PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION

CHAPTER I: A New Truth Emerges

Be not ashamed, women, your privilege encloses the
rest, and is the exit of the rest,
You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of
the soul.

--Walt Whitman

This book aims to be neither the first word on the tangled problems of
human society to-day, nor the last. My aim has been to emphasize, by the
use of concrete and challenging examples and neglected facts, the
need of a new approach to individual and social problems. Its central
challenge is that civilization, in any true sense of the word, is based
upon the control and guidance of the great natural instinct of Sex.
Mastery of this force is possible only through the instrument of Birth
Control.

It may be objected that in the following pages I have rushed in
where academic scholars have feared to tread, and that as an active
propagandist I am lacking in the scholarship and documentary preparation
to undertake such a stupendous task. My only defense is that, from my
point of view at least, too many are already studying and investigating
social problems from without, with a sort of Olympian detachment. And on
the other hand, too few of those who are engaged in this endless war for
human betterment have found the time to give to the world those truths
not always hidden but practically unquarried, which may be secured only
after years of active service.

Of late, we have been treated to accounts written by well-meaning ladies
and gentlemen who have assumed clever disguises and have gone out to
work--for a week or a month--among the proletariat. But can we thus
learn anything new of the fundamental problems of working men, working
women, working children? Something, perhaps, but not those great central
problems of Hunger and Sex. We have been told that only those who
themselves have suffered the pangs of starvation can truly understand
Hunger. You might come into the closest contact with a starving man;
yet, if you were yourself well-fed, no amount of sympathy could give you
actual insight into the psychology of his suffering. This suggests an
objective and a subjective approach to all social problems. Whatever the
weakness of the subjective (or, if you prefer, the feminine) approach,
it has at least the virtue that its conclusions are tested by
experience. Observation of facts about you, intimate subjective
reaction to such facts, generate