PROGRESS WE HAVE MADE
The silence of the centuries has been broken. The wrongs of woman and
the rights of woman have found voices. These voices differ from all
others that have been raised in woman's behalf. They are not the
individual protests of great feminine minds, nor the masculine
remedies for masculine oppression suggested by the stricken
consciences of a few men. Great voices are heard, both of women and of
men, but intermingled with them are millions of voices demanding
freedom.
Let it be repeated that movements mothered by emancipated women are
often deceptive in character. The demand for suffrage, the agitation
against child labor, the regulation of working hours for women, the
insistence upon mothers' pensions are palliatives all. Yet as woman's
understanding develops and she learns to think at the urgence of her
own inner nature, rather than at the dictates of men, she moves on
from these palliatives to fundamental remedies. So at the crest of the
wave of woman's revolt comes the movement for voluntary motherhood--not
a separate, isolated movement, but the manifestation of a cosmic
force--the force that moves the wave itself.
The walls of the cloister have fallen before the cries of a rising
womanhood. The barriers of prurient puritanism are being demolished.
Free woman has torn the veil of indecency from the secrets of life to
reveal them in their power and their purity. Womanhood yet bound has
beheld and understood. A public whose thoughts and opinions had been
governed by men and by women engulfed in the old order has been
shocked awake.
Sneers and jests at birth control are giving way to a reverent
understanding of the needs of woman. They who to-day deny the right of
a woman to control her own body speak with the hardihood of invincible
ignorance or with the folly of those blind ones who in all ages have
opposed the light of progress. Few there are to insist openly that
woman remain a passive instrument of reproduction. The subject of
birth control is being lifted out of the mire into which it was cast
by puritanism and given its proper place among the sciences and the
ideals of this generation. With this effort has come an illumination
of all other social problems. Society is beginning to give ear to the
promise of modern womanhood: "When you have ceased to chain me, I
shall by the virtue of a free motherhood remake the world."
It would be miraculous indeed if that victory which has been won, had
been gained without great toil, insufferable anguish and sacrifice
such as all persons experience when they dare to brave the conventions
of the dead past or blaze a trail for a new order.
But where the vision is clear, the faith deep, forces unseen rally to
assist and carry one over barriers which would otherwise have been
insurmountable. No part of this wave of woman's emancipation has won
its way without such vision and faith.
This is the one movement in which pioneering was unnecessary. The cry
for deliverance always goes up. It is its own pioneer. The facts have
always stared us in the face. No one who has worked among women can be
ignorant of them. I remember that ever since I was a child, the idea
of large families associated itself with poverty in my mind. As I grew
to womanhood, and found myself working in hospitals and in the homes
of the rich and the poor, the association between the two ideas grew
stronger.
In every home of the poor, women asked me the same question. As far
back as 1900, I began to inquire of my associates among the nurses
what one could tell these worried women who asked constantly: "What
can I do?" It is the voice of the elemental urge of woman--it has
always been there; and whether we have heeded it or neglected it, we
have always heard it. Out of this cry came the birth control movement.
Economic conditions have naturally made this elemental need more
plain; sometimes they have lent a more desperate voice to woman's cry
for freedom. Men and women have arisen since Knowlton and Robert Dale
Owen, to advocate the use of contraceptives, but aside from these two
none has come forward to separate it from other issues of _sex_
freedom. But the birth control movement as a movement for woman's
_basic_ freedom was born of that unceasing cry of the socially
repressed, spiritually stifled woman who is constantly demanding:
"What can I do to avoid more children?"
When it came time to arouse new public interest in birth control and
organize a movement, it was found expedient to employ direct and
drastic methods to awaken a slumbering public. The Woman Rebel, a
monthly magazine, was established to proclaim the gospel of revolt.
When its mission was accomplished and the words "birth control" were
on their way to be a symbol of woman's freedom in all civilized
tongues, it went out of existence.
The deceptive "obscenity law," invoked oftener to repress womanhood
and smother scientific knowledge than to restrain the distribution of
verbal and pictorial pornography, was deliberately challenged. This
course had two purposes. It challenged the constitutionality of the
law and thereby brought knowledge of contraceptives to hundreds of
thousands of women.
The first general, organized effort reached in various ways to all
parts of the United States. Particular attention was paid to the
mining districts of West Virginia and Montana, the mill towns of New
England and the cotton districts of the Southern states. Men and women
from all these districts welcomed the movement. They sent letters
pledging their loyalty and their active assistance. They participated
directly and indirectly in the protest which awakened the country.
As time went on, the work was extended to various foreign elements of
the population, this being made possible by the enthusiastic
cooperation of workers who speak the foreign languages.
Leagues were formed to organize those who favored changing the laws.
Lectures were delivered throughout the United States. Articles were
written by eminent physicians, scientists, reformers and
revolutionists. Debates were arranged. Newspapers and magazines of all
kinds, classes and languages gave the subject of birth control serious
attention, taking one side or the other of the discussion that was
aroused. New books on the subject began to appear. Books by foreign
authors were reprinted and distributed in the United States. The Birth
Control Review, edited by voluntary effort and supported by a stock
company of women who make contributions instead of taking dividends,
was founded and continues its work.
After a year's study in foreign countries for the purpose of
supplementing the knowledge gained in my fourteen years as a nurse, I
came back to the United States determined to open a clinic. I had
decided that there could be no better way of demonstrating to the
public the necessity of birth control and the welcome it would receive
than by taking the knowledge of contraceptive methods directly to
those who most needed it.
A clinic was opened in Brooklyn. There 480 women received information
before the police closed the consulting rooms and arrested Ethel
Byrne, a registered nurse, Fania Mindell, a translator, and myself.
The purpose of this clinic was to demonstrate to the public the
practicability and the necessity of such institutions. All women who
came seeking information were workingmen's wives. All had children. No
unmarried girls came at all. Men came whose wives had nursing children
and could not come. Women came from the farther parts of Long Island,
from cities in Massachusetts and Connecticut and even more distant
places. Mothers brought their married daughters. Some whose ages were
from 25 to 35 looked fifty, but the clinic gave them new hope to face
the years ahead. These women invariably expressed their love for
children, but voiced a common plea for means to avoid others, in order
that they might give sufficient care to those already born. They
wanted them "to grow up decent."
For ten days the two rooms of this clinic were crowded to their
utmost. Then came the police. We were hauled off to jail and
eventually convicted of a "crime."
Ethel Byrne instituted a hunger strike for eleven days, which
attracted attention throughout the nation. It brought to public notice
the fact that women were ready to die for the principle of voluntary
motherhood. So strong was the sentiment evoked that Governor Whitman
pardoned Mrs. Byrne.
No single act of self-sacrifice in the history of the birth-control
movement has done more to awaken the conscience of the public or to
arouse the courage of women, than did Ethel Byrne's deed of
uncompromising resentment at the outrage of jailing women who were
attempting to disseminate knowledge which would emancipate the
motherhood of America.
Courage like hers and like that of others who have undergone arrest
and imprisonment, or who night after night and day after day have
faced street crowds to speak or to sell literature--the faith and the
untiring labors of still others who have not come into public notice--have
given the movement its dauntless character and assure the final victory.
One dismal fact had become clear long before the Brownsville clinic
was opened. The medical profession as a whole had ignored the tragic
cry of womanhood for relief from forced maternity. The private
practitioners, one after another, shook their heads and replied: "It
cannot be done. It is against the law," and the same answer came from
clinics and public hospitals.
The decision of the New York State Court of Appeals has disposed of
that objection, however, though as yet few physicians have cared to
make public the fact that they take advantage of the decision. While
the decision of the lower courts in my own case was upheld, partly
because I was a nurse and not a physician, the court incidentally held
that under the laws as they now stand in New York, any physician has a
right to impart information concerning contraceptives to women as a
measure for curing or preventing disease. The United States Supreme
Court threw out my appeal without consideration of the merits of the
case. Therefore, the decision of the New York State Court of Appeals
stands. And under that decision, a physician has a right, and it is
therefore his duty, to prescribe contraceptives in such cases, at
least, as those involving disease.
It is true that Section 1142 of the Penal Code of New York State does
not except the medical man, and does not allow him to instruct his
patient in birth control methods, even though she is suffering from
tuberculosis, syphilis, kidney disorders or heart disease. Without
looking farther, the physicians had let that section go at its face
value. No doctor had questioned either its purpose or its legal scope.
The medical profession was content to let this apparent limitation
upon its rights stand, and it remained for a woman to go to jail to
demonstrate the fact that under another section of the same code--1145--the
physician had the vital right just described.
It is safe to say that many physicians do not even yet know of their
legal rights in this matter.
But here is what the New York State Court of Appeals said on January
8, 1918, in an opinion thus far unquestioned and which is the law of
the state:
"Secondly, by section 1145 of the Penal Law, physicians are excepted
from the provisions of this act under circumstances therein mentioned.
This section reads: 'An article or instrument, used or applied by
physicians lawfully practicing, or by their direction or prescription,
for the cure or prevention of disease, is not an article of indecent
or immoral nature or use, within this article. The supplying of such
articles to such physicians or by their direction or prescription, is
not an offense under this article.'
"This exception in behalf of physicians does not permit advertisements
regarding such matters, nor promiscuous advice to patients
irrespective of their condition, but it is broad enough to protect the
physician who in good faith gives such help or advice to a married
person to cure or prevent disease. 'Disease,' by Webster's
International Dictionary, is defined to be, 'an alteration in the
state of the body, or of some of its organs, interrupting or
disturbing the performance of the vital functions, and causing or
threatening pain and sickness; illness, disorder.'
"The protection thus afforded the physician would also extend to the
druggist, or vendor, acting upon the physician's prescription or
order."