One of the most important developments in the expansion of eugenics was its relationship with feminism. The alliance between the two movements was a curious tangle from the very beginning, and remains a tangle today. Feminists and eugenicists had very different goals, but some of them agreed about some things that they wanted in the short run. The person who brought the two movements together in an alliance that has lasted to this day was Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Sanger was an eloquent writer, but Planned Parenthood has not made much of an effort to publish and distribute her books for the last 50 years. But if her followers did not want people reading her books, her opponents did. When the copyright on her books finally expired and it became legal for anyone to publish them, Planned Parenthood's critics began to distribute her books, precisely because she was an eloquent eugenicist.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the legacy of Margaret Sanger still plagues us; she was an effective leader in the war to inflict contraception, sterilization and abortion on the world. She talked about the exaltation of joyful sex, but ended by trivializing human sexuality into barnyard activity. She talked about service to the poor, but she built an organization that has killed millions and millions of people, tiny children who were executed for the crime of being conceived in poverty. She helped to lay the foundations for global population control, pitting wealthy white nations against the rest of the world.
Despite her influence, her work is often misunderstood. She is generally seen as some kind of feminist hero, when most of her work is better understood in terms of eugenics. She subverted feminism, betraying the idealists to power-hungry men. One way to understand her life's work is to examine the alliance between feminists and eugenicists that she built, an alliance that lasts to this day.
Sanger wrote many things, but there were two books that show her thought especially clearly. Both were published when the American eugenics movement was just hitting its stride, and both were written to get feminists excited about eugenics.
The title of one of these books, Woman and the New Race (New York: Brentano's 1920), shows exactly what Sanger is setting out to do, but readers today are so unaware of eugenics that they miss what was obvious then. The title would be clearer to us today if she had named the book Feminism and Eugenics, but it would not have been clearer to readers of the 1920s. They understood the title without difficulty, since there was so much talk at the time about building a new race, improving the human species through eugenics. The other book, Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano's 1922) has a less revealing title, but is nonetheless transparent when the reader knows a little about eugenics. The "pivot" is womankind. The new civilization that they can bring in, if they choose to do so, is one in which the next generation will be a new and improved product.
Sanger's defenders, who are properly uncomfortable when her commitment to eugenics is exposed, make much of the fact that she offered some criticisms of eugenics. She asserted that the vision of the eugenicists was too limited or was impractical. But her criticisms of other eugenicists do not mean she was not one herself. She criticized eugenics, but from the inside. You can criticize your own ideology or religion in the third person. If a Catholic were to say, "The Catholic Church ought to pay a lot more attention to [pick a problem]," it would not in any way indicate distance from or disloyalty to the Church. Sanger was a member of the [English] Eugenics Society and the American Eugenics Society, and she joined those societies because she believed in their ideas.
In the end, though, it does not matter whether she referred to eugenicists as colleagues or as competitors; what mattered was what she believed and taught. So what did she think? She accepted the Malthusian theory that overpopulation is the root of all evil. In her view, a glut of humans was the root cause of warfare, low wages, famine and plague, to mention just a few. In Woman and the New Race, she wrote, "No despot ever flung forth his legions to die in foreign conquest, no privilege-ruled nation ever erupted across its borders, to lock in death embrace with another, but behind them loomed the driving power of a population too large for its boundaries and its natural resources."
Her attitude toward human individuals is full of contempt, charging that "woman has, through her reproductive ability, founded and perpetuated the tyrannies of the Earth. Whether it was the tyranny of a monarchy, an oligarchy or a republic, the one indispensable factor of its existence was, as it is now, hordes of human beings -- human beings so plentiful as to be cheap, and so cheap that ignorance was their natural lot."
Women who fail to adopt Sanger's theories were also objects of her scorn: "The creators of over-population are the women, who, while wringing their hands over each fresh horror, submit anew to their task of producing the multitudes who will bring about the next tragedy of civilization." Sanger charged that these uncooperative women are guilty not only of bringing in the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, but also a list of other evils: "While unknowingly laying the foundations of tyrannies and providing the human tinder for racial conflagrations, woman was also unknowingly creating slums, filling asylums with insane, and institutions with other defectives. She was replenishing the ranks of the prostitutes, furnishing grist for the criminal courts and inmates for prisons. Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively."
At the end of Woman and the New Race, Sanger described her goal, and again put feminism in a fascinating context. "What is the goal of woman's upward struggle?" she asked, then offered three possible answers: "Is it voluntary motherhood? Is it general freedom? Or is it the birth of a new race?" She embraces all three goals, and dozens of others, including an end to every evil known to humanity. But over and over, feminism is a means, and the end is an improved race: freedom and "voluntary motherhood" will "remake the world."
Neither of these books has been easy to get in recent years. Planned Parenthood held the copyright on these books until they expired, and did not promote them, despite their eloquence. Slowly, the truth will come out: Sanger and her followers brought death and destruction for unborn children -- not to assert women's rights, but to build a master race.
Margaret Sanger's two books, Pivot of Civilization and Woman and the New Race, are now in the public domain, and are available (on disk please email for a copy) so that readers may judge for themselves what Margaret Sanger was about.
A Plan For Peaceby Margaret SangerFirst, put into action President Wilson's fourteen points, upon which terms Germany and Austria surrendered to the Allies in 1918. [Sanger takes note of the existence of other peace plans.] Second, have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population, the directors representing the various branches of science: [Sanger thought that the work of controlling population was a matter for science] this body to direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and to direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of the individuals. [Is Sanger referring to religious opposition as a matter of taste?] The main objects of the Population Congress would be: a. To raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population. [positive eugenics] b. to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11 per thousand. c. to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924. [Sanger supported the anti-immigration laws.] d. to apply a stern and rigid [!] policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring. [Sanger supported eugenic sterilization.] e. To insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization. [Aware of the resistance to sterilization, Sanger supported paying bribes or "incentives."] f. To give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization. [What did she mean by a "dysgenic group"? Indians? How is this different from objective "d" above?] g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives. The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics. [Sanger used impersonal terms from industry -- intake, output -- referring to the birth of vulnerable people. What is "intake"?] The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct. [Sanger proposed to use medical personnel for a government program that was not designed for the benefit of the patients.] Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense -- defending the unborn against their own disabilities. [The "defense" is that the unborn will be kept out of existence. Sanger's language inspires cynicism.] The third step would be to give special attention to the mother's health, to see that women who are suffering from tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, toxic goitre, gonorrhea, or any disease where the condition of pregnancy disturbs their health are placed under public health nurses to instruct them in practical, scientific methods of contraception in order to safeguard their lives -- thus reducing maternal mortality. [Sanger proposed to use maternal health programs to push contraception.] The above steps may seem to place emphasis on a health program instead of on tariffs, moratoriums and debts, but I believe that national health is the first essential factor in any program for universal peace. With the future citizen safeguarded from hereditary taints, with five million mental and moral degenerates segregated, with ten million women and ten million children receiving adequate care [in her view, care is adequate if it includes contraception], we could then turn our attention to the basic needs for international peace. There would then be a definite effort to make population increase slowly and at a specified rate, in order to accommodate and adjust increasing numbers to the best social and economic system. In the meantime we should organize and join an International League of Low Birth Rate Nations to secure and maintain World Peace. A short article following Sanger's "Plan for Peace" in the Birth Control Review referred to the views of a prominent economist and officer of the Eugenics Society: "Professor John Maynard Keynes, eminent authority on post-war economic problems, speaks of contraceptive information as the most important aid on the political horizon and says that without it we might as well throw all treaties into the waste basket." Sanger had powerful support for her view that peace required population control.
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1. Who were the "suffragists" and what did they do?
2. Who was Margaret Sanger? Was she a feminist or a eugenicist?
3. What is the "pivot" of civilization, in Sanger's view? When Sanger wrote about a "new race," what did she mean?
4. What did Sanger mean by "segregation"? Describe Sanger's "Peace Plan."
5. What are the links between Planned Parenthood and the American Eugenics Society?
Discuss: What is the relationship between eugenics and feminism?
