The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Pivot of Civilization, by Margaret Sanger

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Title: The Pivot of Civilization

Author: Margaret Sanger

Release Date: November 8, 2008 [EBook #1689]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION

By Margaret Sanger

To Alice Drysdale Vickery

Whose prophetic vision of liberated womanhood has been an inspiration

"I dream of a world in which the spirits of women are flames stronger
than fire, a world in which modesty has become courage and yet remains
modesty, a world in which women are as unlike men as ever they were
in the world I sought to destroy, a world in which women shine with
a loveliness of self-revelation as enchanting as ever the old legends
told, and yet a world which would immeasurably transcend the old world
in the self-sacrificing passion of human service. I have dreamed of that
world ever since I began to dream at all."

--Havelock Ellis

CONTENTS

Introduction By H. G. Wells

Chapter
I A New Truth Emerges
II Conscripted Motherhood
III "Children Troop Down from Heaven"
IV The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded
V The Cruelty of Charity
VI Neglected Factors of the World Problem
VII Is Revolution the Remedy?
VIII Dangers of Cradle Competition
IX A Moral Necessity
X Science the Ally
XI Education and Expression
XII Woman and the Future

Appendix: Principles and Aims of the American Birth Control League

INTRODUCTION

Birth Control, Mrs. Sanger claims, and claims rightly, to be a question
of fundamental importance at the present time. I do not know how far
one is justified in calling it the pivot or the corner-stone of a
progressive civilization. These terms involve a criticism of metaphors
that may take us far away from the question in hand. Birth Control is no
new thing in human experience, and it has been practised in societies of
the most various types and fortunes. But there can be li