THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION
By Margaret Sanger
Contents
INTRODUCTION
THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION
| CHAPTER I: | A New Truth Emerges |
| CHAPTER II: | Conscripted Motherhood |
| CHAPTER III: | "Children Troop Down From Heaven...." |
| CHAPTER IV: | The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded |
| CHAPTER V: | The Cruelty of Charity |
| CHAPTER VI: | Neglected Factors of the World Problem |
| CHAPTER VII: | Is Revolution the Remedy? |
| CHAPTER VIII: | Dangers of Cradle Competition |
| CHAPTER IX: | A Moral Necessity |
| CHAPTER X: | Science the Ally |
| CHAPTER XI: | Education and Expression |
| CHAPTER XII: | Woman and the Future |
APPENDIX
PRINCIPLES AND AIMS OF THE AMERICAN BIRTH CONTROL LEAGUE
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
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 little doubt that at the