Danver Steven L. (Edited). Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia (ENG)
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woman is incapable of human emotion it would be impossible to realize the grief, the dis-
grace, the tears, the wounded pride that was ours every time we were pulled in.”
Strange, isn’t it, that a woman who has kept a “house” should be able to feel that way?
But stranger still that a good Christian world should bleed and fleece such women, and
give them nothing in return except obloquy and persecution. Oh, for the charity of a
Christian world!
Source: Emma Goldman, The Traffic in Women (New York: Mother Earth Publishing,
1910), 2–27.
B. Marriage and Love
Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the
ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, more exacting. Its
returns are insignifica ntly small compared with the investments. In taking out an insur-
ance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments.
If, however, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy,
her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.” Moreover, the marriage insurance
condemns her to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual
as well as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his sphere is wider, marriage does not limit
him as much as woman. He feels his chains more in an economic sense. ...
[B]ehind every marriage stands the life-long environment of the two sexes; an envi-
ronment so different from each other that man and woman must remain strangers. Sep-
arated by an insurmountable wall of superstition, custom, and habit, marriage has not the
potentiality of developing knowledge of, and respect for, each other, without which
every union is doomed to failure.
Henrik Ibsen, the hater of all social shams, was probably the first to realize this great
truth. Nora leaves her husband, not—as the stupid critic would have it—because she is
tired of her responsibil ities or feels the need of woman’s rights , but because she has
come to know that for eight years she had lived with a stranger and borne him children.
Can there by anything more humiliating, more degrading than a life-long proximity
between two strangers? No need for the woman to know anything of the man, save his
income. As to the knowledge of the woman—what is there to know except that she
has a pleasing appearance? We ha ve not yet outgrown the theologic myth that woman
has no soul, that she is a mere appendix to man, made out of his rib just for the conven-
ience of the gentleman who was so strong that he was afraid of his own shadow.
Perchance the poor quality of the material whence woman comes is responsibl e for
the inferiority. At any rate, woman has no s oul—what is there to know about her?
Besides, the less soul a woman has the greater her asset as a wife, the more readily will
she absorb herself in her husband. It is this slavish acquiescence to man’s superiority that
has kept the marriage institution seemingly intact for so long a period. Now that woman
is coming into her own, now that she is actually growing aware of herself as a being out-
side of the master’s grace, the sacred institution of marriage is gradually being under-
mined, and no amount of sentimental lamentation can stay it.
526 Women’s Movement (1870s)
From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal;
therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end. Like the mute
beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that. Yet, strange to say, she is allowed
to know much less about her function as wife and mother than the ordinary artisan of
his trade. It is indecent and filthy for a respectable girl to know anything of the marital
relation. Oh, for the inconsistency of respectability, that needs the marriage vow to
turn something which is filthy into the purest and most sacred arrangement that none
dare question or criticize. Yet that is exactly the attitude of the average u pholder of
marriage. The prospective wife and mother is kept in complete ignorance of her only
asset in the competiti ve field—sex. Thus sh e enters into life-l ong relations with a
man only to find her self sho cked, repel led, outraged beyond measure by the most
natural and healthy instinct, sex. It is safe to say that a large percentage of the unhappi-
ness, misery, distress, and physical suffering of matrimony is due to the criminal igno-
rance in sex matters that is being extolledasagreatvirtue.Norisitatallan
exaggeration when I say that more than one home has been broken up because of this
deplorable fact.
If, however, woman is free and big enough to learn t he mystery of sex without the
sanction of State or Church, she will stand condemned as utterly unfit to become the
wife of a “goo d” man, his goodness consist ing of an empty head and plenty of money.
Can there be anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman, full
of life and passi on, mus t deny nature’s demand, must subdue her most intense craving,
undermine her health and break her spirit, must stunt her vision, abstain from the depth
and glory of sex experience until a “good” man comes along to take her unto himself as a
wife? That is precisely what marriage means. How can such an arrangement end except in
failure? This is one, though not the least important, factor of marriage, which differenti-
ates it from love. ...
The moral lesson instilled in the girl is not whether the man has aroused her love, but
rather is it, “How much?” The important and only God of practical American life: Can the
man make a living? Can he support a wife? That is the only thing that justifies marriage.
Gradually this saturates every tho ught of the girl; her dreams are not of moonlight and
kisses, of laughter and tears; she dreams of shopping tours and bargain counters. This
soul-povert y and sordidness are the elements inherent in the marriage institution. The
State and the Church approve of no other ideal, simply because it is the one that neces-
sitates the State and Church control of men and women.
Doubtless there are people who continue to consider love above dollars and cents.
Particularly is this true of that class whom economic necessity has forced to become
self-supporting. The tremendous change in woman’s position, wrought by that mighty
factor, is indeed phenomenal when we reflectthatitisbutashorttimesinceshehas
entered the industrial arena. Six million women wage worker s; six million women, who
have the equal right with men to be exploited, to be robbed, to go on strike; aye, to
starve even. Anything more, my lord? Yes, six million wage workers in every walk of life,
from the highest brain work to the mines and the railroad tracks; yes, even detectives
and policemen. Surely the emancipation is complete.
Women’s Movement (1870s) 527
Yet with all that, but a very small number of the vast army of women wag e workers
look upon wo rk as a permanent issue, in the same light as does man. No matter how
decrepit the latter, he has been taught to be independent, self-supporting. Oh, I know
that no one is really in dependent in our economic treadmill; st ill, the poorest specimen
of a man hates to be a parasite; to be known as such, at any rate.
The woman considers h er position as worker transitory, to be thrown aside for
the first bidder. That is why it is infinitely har der to organize women than men.
“Why should I join a union? I am going to get married, to have a home.” Has she
not been taught from infancy to look upon that as her ultimate calling? She learns
soon enough that the hom e, though not so large a prison as the fac tory, h as more
solid doors and bars. It has a keeper so faithful that naught can escape him. The most
tragic part, however, is that the home no longer frees her from wage slavery; it only
increases her task.
According to the latest statistics submitted before a Committee “on labor and wages,
and congestion of population,” ten per cent of the wage workers in New York City alone
are married, yet they must continue to work at the most poorly paid labor in the world.
Add to this horrible aspect the drudgery of housework, and what remains of the protec-
tion and glory of the home? As a matter of fact, even the middle-class girl in marriage can
not speak of her home, sin ce it is the man w ho cre ates her sph ere. It is not important
whether the husband is a brute or a darling. What I wish to prove is that marriage guar-
antees woman a home only by the grace of her husband. There she moves about in his
home, year after year, until her aspect of life and human affairs becomes as flat, narrow,
and drab as her surroundings. Small wonder if she becomes a nag, petty, quarrelsome,
gossipy, unbearable, thus driving the man from the house. She could not go, if she wanted
to; there is no place to go. Besides, a short period of married life, of complete surrender
of a ll faculties , absolutely incapacitates the average woman for the outside world. She
becomes reckless in appearance, clumsy in her movements, dependent in her decisions,
cowardly in her judgment, a weight and a bore, which most men grow to hate and
despise. ...
The institution of marriage makes a p arasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It
incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her
imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a trav-
esty on human character. ...
Some day, some day men and women will rise, they will reach the mountain peak, they
will meet big and strong and free, ready to receive, to partake, and to bask in the golden
rays of love. What fancy, what imagination, what poetic genius can foresee even approx-
imately the potentialities of such a force in the life of men and women. If the world is ever
to give birth to true companionship and oneness, not marriage, but love will be the
parent.
Source: Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love (New York: Mother Earth Publishing, 1910),
5–18.
528 Women’s Movement (1870s)
Excerpts from Anna Garlin Spencer’s Woman’s Share
in Social Culture (1912)
Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931) was a Rhode Island schoolteacher, a journalist for the Provi-
dence Daily Journal, and an ordained minister in an independent church in Providence. In the
following excerpts from her Woman’s Shar e in Social Culture, Spencer eloquently describes
how society forces women to suppress their talents and abilities.
“Talent,” says Lowell, “is that which is in a man’s power; genius is that in whose power a
man is.” If genius, even in its lesser ranges, be this irresistible pressure toward some
unique self-expression, then women cannot be left out of the charmed circle; especially
when we rem ember Helen Hunt with her solitary but wid e approach to love and life,
and Emily Dickinson, that hermit thrush among poets. Nor can those unique interpreters
of art and literature among women whose vital expression has so enhanced the works of
genius as to make them seem new creations, be left out of the count. In modern times,
the growing company of musicians, some of them c omp oser s, and t he artis ts of pe n
and brush, and the sculptors among women who swell the secondary ranks of genius in
numbers and in power, must have increasing recognition.
All this, however, does not reach the deepest considerations involved in taking
account of the intellectual contribution of women to art, science, philosophy and affairs.
Whatever may be the reasons in nature for the lower level of women along these lines of
man’s greatest achievement, there are the gravest reasons in circumstance for the com-
paratively meagre showing. In addi tion to the handicap of lack of e ducation, a handicap
which no exceptional success of the self-made man or woman can offset for the majority
of the talented, there is no less important deprivation which all women have suffered in
the past and most women now suffer. This deprivation is that of the informal but highly
stimulating training which the good fellowship of their ch osen guild of study an d of ser-
vice gives t o men, but which is denied for the most part even to professional women.
For example, women have been in t he medical p rofession for a considerable time, a nd
have obtained high distinction in it. They have won just recognition from many influential
doctors of the other sex. Yet they can hardly be said to have entered the inner circle of
their clan. They may stop to dinner at medical conventions, it is true, provided they make
no fuss about smoking and do not mi nd being in the m inority; but there are few men,
even in that enlightened group, who can so sink sex-consciousness in professional com-
radeship as either to give or get the full social value that might be gained from a mixed
company of like vocation. The women lawyers and members of the clergy are in even
smaller minority, and hence suffer still more from the embarrassment of the “exception”
which prevents easy and familiar association. In the teaching profession, where the rela-
tive numbers of the sexes are reversed, there is often more adequate professional inter-
course; but the woman college professor, or college president, is still that one among
many whose reception into her special class, even if courteous and friendly, is too formal
and occasional for real guild fellowship.
Women’s Movement (1870s) 529
To this negative deprivation must be added the positive opposition of men to the
entrance of women into that professional life and work from which the genius arises as
the race flower from a vast field. The whole course of evolution in industry, and in the
achievements of higher education and exceptional talent, has shown man’s invariable ten-
dency to shut women out when their activities have reached a highly specialized period
of growth. The primitive woman-worker, as Jack-at-all-trades, does not develop any
one employment to its height of perfection. Gradually initiating old men and boys, not fit-
ted for war and the chase, into these varied forms of effort, women start the other sex
toward that concentration of effort upon one process-activity which finally develops sep-
arate arts, sciences and professions. When this point is r eached, the “woman’s work”
usually becomes “ man’s work”; and when that time comes, men turn round and shut
out women from the l abor wh ich women themselves have initiate d. Thi s monopolistic
tendency of men is shown most clearly in the history of the learned professions. Women
were seldom, if ever, priests but they participated in religious services when religion was
a family affair. When a priestly caste arose and became the symbol of peculiar authority,
only men entered its ranks. ...
Again, women developed law and its application to life in the germs of family rule and
tribal custom quite as much as did me n; but when statutes took the place of traditio n,
and courts superseded personal judgeship, a nd when a special class of lawye rs was
needed to define and administer laws, which grew more difficult to understand with
growing complexity of social relationship, men alone entered that profession. ...
This process of differentiating and perfecting intellectual labor, the process in which at
most acute periods of specia lization and advance, women were wholly shut out of their
own ancient work, finds its most complete and its most dramatic illustration in the history
of the medical profession. Some phases of the healing art have always been connected in
primitive society with the priestly office and, hence, in the hands of man. Three great
branches, however, were always, in all forms of social organization of which we have
knowledge, in the hands exclusively of women, namely, midwifer y, the treatment of dis-
eases of women so far as those were cared for at all, and the diseases of children. ...
The result of this sex-segregation in the care of the si ck in these important branches
has been that women doctors, unschooled but often not unskilled, have served all the
past of human experience in childbirth, in child-care, and in the special illnesses of women.
This has been true in our own, as well as in older civilizations up to the 18th century. In
our own country, in colonial times, only women ushere d into a bleak New England th e
potential citizens of the new world. We read of Mrs. Wiat, who died in 1705 at the age
of 94 years, ha ving assiste d as midwife at the birth of more than 1,100 children. And in
Rehoboth, one of the oldest c ommunities in Massachusetts, the Town Meeting itself
“called” from England, “Dr. Sam Fuller and his mother,” he to practise medicine and she
“as midwife to answer to the town’s necessity, which was great.” Busied with other mat-
ters, the Colonies paid little attention to medical science until the war of the American
Revolution betrayed the awful results of ignorance in the slaughter of soldiers by prevent-
able disease. When the healing art began to become a true science and took great strides
toward better training and facilities of practice for the student, attention was at once
530 Women’s Movement (1870s)
drawn to the need for better service in the fields wholly occupied by women. The open-
ing and im provement of the medical schools, however, was a new opp ortunity for men
alone and the new demand for more scientific care of women in childbirth and for higher
medical service to childhood and for the women suffering from special diseases, resulted
in the greatest of innovations, namely, the assumption by men of the office of midwife and
their entrance into the most intimate relationships with women patients. Dr. James Lloyd,
after two years’; study in England, began to practise “obstetrics” (the new name that dis-
guised in some degree the daring change in medical practice) in Boston, in 1762. Dr. Ship-
pen, similarly trained abroad, took up the same practice in Philadelphia and added lectures
upon the subject. Thus began in our own country the elevation of this important branch
of the healing art to a professional standard and the consequent exclusion of women from
their immortal rights in the sickroom. It was a poor recognition of the debt the race owed
to the mother-sex, both as suffering the pangs of childbirth and as helping to assuage them
and in caring for the infants and children of all time! After men entered upon the task of
perfecting the medical profession, and incidentially shutting women out of it, it did not
take long, however, f or the thoughtful to see the propriety of allowing wom en those
advantages of training which would put them back again into thei r rightful place on the
higher plane of science now demanded. What gave sharp point to this feeling was the
common opposition to men engaging in these ancient prerogatives of wom en. This was
at first as intense and as bitter as the later opposition to the entrance of women in the
coeducational medical schools. ...The first women who tried to secure training in medi-
cal schools in order to ree
¨
nter those branches of the healing art from which they had so
recently been driven, and on the higher plane of science now properly demanded,
endured such hardships as m ade them veritable martyrs. In 1847 Harriot K. Hunt
knocked at the door of H arvard Medical School to be persistently refused admission. In
1849 Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from Geneva Medical School, having secured instruc-
tion as a special favor, and began her great career, devoted equally to securing the best
possible medical training for women, and to elevating to higher standards than had as
yet been attained by men the whole area of medical training. Among the heroic figures
of these early days are to be found many married women whose husbands, oft en them-
selves physicians, helped them to obtain their t raining . ...Theattitudeofthemenof
the medical profession generally, however, was one of the utmost hostility, showing every
form of monopolistic selfishness and injustice. ...All this was without reference to the
intellectual standing or practical efficiency of the women graduates. The mere fact of
women entering the profession meant, in the minds of these protestants, degradation
to the men already in it! Earlier than thi s, in 1859, the Medical Society of the County of
Philadelphia pas sed “resolutions of excommunication” against every physician who
should “teach in a medical school for women” and every one who should “consult w ith
a woman physician or with a man teaching a woman medical student.” ...Nevertheless,
the women did ree
¨
nter their ancient profession of healing after a brief exclusion. So far
from permanently lowering the standards of training n ewly established, their chief pio-
neer leader, Elizabeth Blackwell, was instrumental i n inaugurating modern preventive
medicine, by the establishment in the New York Medical College for Women, opened
Women’s Movement (1870s) 531
in 1865, of the first chair of Hygiene ever set apart in a medical college in the United
States. In 1882 this pioneer medical colle ge for women set forth the bravest and truest
of philosophies respecting women’s work in the following words: “We call upon all those
who believe in the higher education of women to help set the highest possible standards
for their medical education; and we call upon those who do not bel ieve i n such higher
education to help in mak ing such requirements as shall turn aside the incompetent;—
not by any exercise of arbitrary power, but by a demonstration of incapacity, which is
the only logical, manly reason for refusing to allow women to pursue an honorable calling
in an honorable way.”
This brief allusio n to the heroic struggle of woman to ree
¨
nter the healing art against
the positive opposition of men already entrenched in all the coigns of vantage in profes-
sional training and organized professional guilds, furnishes a flashlight picture of the whole
course of woman’s entrance into the more modern types of differentiated labor. ...
In addition to these handicaps must be named the well-known but scarcely adequately
measured interruptions to both study and self-expression which the women of talent and
specialized power have alwa ys experienced. Anyone can see tha t to write Uncle Tom’s
Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of
housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write
it at leisure in a quiet room. ...
When we read of Charles Darwin’s wife not o nly relieving him from financial cares
but seeing that he had his breakfast in his room, with “nothing to disturb the freshness
of his morning,” we do not find the expla nation of Darw in’s genius, but we do see how
he was helped to express it. Men geniuses, even of second grade, have usually had at least
one woman to smooth their way, and often several women to make sure that little
things, often even self-support itself, did not interfere with the development and expres-
sion of their talent. On the other hand, the obligation of all the earlier women writers to
prepare a useful cook-book in order to buy their way into literature, is a fitting symbol of
the compulsion laid upon women, however gifted, to do all the things that women in gen-
eral accomplish before entering upon their special tasks. ...
Added to all this, the woman of talent and of special gifts has had until very lately, and
in most countries has still, to go against the massed social pressure of her time in order
to devote he rself to any particular intellectual task. The expectation of society has long
pushed men toward some special work; the exp ectation of society has until recently
been wholly against women’s choosing any vocation beside their functional service in
the family. This is a far more intense and all-pervading influence in deterring women from
success in intellectual work than is usually understood. ...No book has yet been written
in prai se of a woman who let her husband and children starve or suffer while she
invented even the most useful things, or wrote books, or expressed herself in art, or
evolved philosophic systems. On the contrary, the mildest approach on the part of a wife
and mother, or even of a daughter or siste r, to that intense interest i n sel f-expression
which has always characterized genius has been met with social disapproval and until very
recent times with ostracism fit only for the criminal. Hence her inner impulsion has
needed to be strong indeed to make any woman devote herself to ideas.
532 Women’s Movement (1870s)
In view of these tremendous obstacles, it is fair to assume that when women in the
past have achieved even a second or third place in the ranks of genius they have shown
far more native ability than men have needed to reach the same eminence. Not excused
from the more general duties that constitute the cement of society, most women of tal-
ent have had but one hand free with which to work out their ideal conceptions. ...
The genius is at once the most self-centered and the most universal of human beings.
He sees only himself and the world of thought or of affairs he would master for his spe-
cial work. All that lies between, family, friends, social groups, is but material for his elect
service. Delight in hi s own personality, absorbed attention to the processe s of his own
mind, have made him generally the master shirker in respect to the ordinary duties of life.
He has been often “ill to live with,” and greedy in demand upon the support and care of
others. He is so rare and precious, however, that “with all his faults we love him still.” ...
to suppress in wholesale fashion, and at the outset, a ll troublesome “variations” in
women, while leaving men free to show what they can become and giving them besides
a good chance to prove their quality, is to make that discipline too one-sided. The univer-
sal social pressure upon women to be all alike, and do all the same things, and to be con-
tent with identical restrictions, has resulted not only in terrible suffering in the lives of
exc eptional women, but also in the loss of unmeasured feminine values in special g ifts.
The Drama of the Woman of Genius has been too often a tragedy of misshapen and per-
verted power. ...
Source: Anna Garlin Spencer, Woman’s Share in Social Culture (New York: J. B. Lippincott,
1912), 45–88.
Margaret Sanger on Sex Education
and Contraception (1913)
Margaret Sanger (1883–1966) was a leader in the fight for birth control. She believed that con-
traceptives freed women by giving to them greater control of their bodies and thus lessening their
economic dependence on men. Arrested under the Comstock anti-obscenity law, Sanger fled to
Britain in 1914, but returned to New York two years later to open a birth control clinic in Brook-
lyn for poor women. The authorities closed the clinic and Sanger was convicted of obscenity. On
appeal, her conviction was upheld, but the court ruled that physicians could distribute birth con-
trol information to prevent the s pread of disease. This ex ception was the basis upon which
Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921. Reproduced here are excerp ts on
the fight for birth control from Sanger’s Women and the New Race.
The excerpts contained in this chapter are typical of the letters which come to me by the
thousands. They tell their own story, simply—sometimes ungrammatically and illiter-
ately, but nevertheless irresistibly. It is the story of slow murder of the helpless by a soci-
ety that shields itself behind ancient, inhuman moral creeds-which dares to weigh those
dead creeds against the agony of the living who pray for the “mercy of death.”
Women’s Movement (1870s) 533
Can a mother who would “rather die” than bear more children serve society by bear-
ing still others? Can children carried through nine months of dread and unspeakable
mental anguish and born into an atmosphere of fear and anger, to grow up uneducate d
and in want, be a benefit to the world? Here is what the mother says:
I have read in the paper about you and am very interested in Birth Control. I am a
mother of four living children and one dead the oldest 10 and baby 22 months old.
I am very nervous and sickly after my children. I would like you to advise me what
to do to prevent from having any more as I would rather die than have another. I
am keeping away from my husband as much as I can, but it causes quarrels and
almost separation. All my babies have had marasmus in the first year of their lives
and I almost lost my baby last summer. I always worry about my children so much.
My husband works in a brass foundry it is not a very good job and living is so high
that we have to live as cheap as possible. I’ve only got 2 rooms and kitchen and I do
all my work and sewing which is very hard for me.
...Here is a letter from a paralytic mother, whose days and nights are tortured by the
thought of another ch ild, and whose reason is tottering at the prospect of leaving her
children without her care:
I sent for a copy of your magazine and now feel I must write you to see if you can
help me.
I was a high school girl who married a day laborer seven years ago. In a few months,
I will again be a mother, the fourth child in less than six years. While carryi ng my
babies am always partly paralyzed on one side. Do not know the cause but the
doctor said at last birth we must be “more careful,” as I could not stand having so
many children. Am always very sick for a long time and have to have chloroform.
We can afford help only about 3 weeks, until I am on my feet again, after confine-
ment. I work as hard as I can but my work and my children are always neglected. I
wonder if my body does survive this next birth if my reason will.
It is terrible to think of bringing these little bodies and souls into the world without
means or strength to care for them. And I can see no relief unless you give it to me
or tell me where to get it. I am weaker each time and I know that this must be the
last one, for it would be better for me to go, than to bring more neglected babies
into the world. I c an hardly sleep at night for worrying. Is t here an answer for
women like me?
In another chapter, we have gotte n a glim pse of t he menace of the feeblemi nded.
Here is a woman who is praying for help to avoid adding to the number of mentally
helpless:
My baby is only 10 months old and the oldest one of four is 7, and more care than a
baby, has always been helpless. We do not own a roof over our heads and I am so
534 Women’s Movement (1870s)
discouraged I want to die if nothing can be done. Can’t you help me just this time
and then I know I can take care of myself. Ignorance on this all important subject
has put me where I am. I don’t know how to be sure of bringing myself around. I
beg of you to help me and anything I can do to help further your wonderful work
I will do. Only help me this once, no one will know only I will be blessed.
I not only have a terrible time when I am confined but caring for the oldest child it
preys so on my mind that I fear more defective children. Help me please!
Not even the blindest of all dogmatists can ignore the danger to the community of to-
day and the race of to-morrow in permitting an insane woman to go on bearing children.
Here is a letter which tells a two-sided story—how mother instinct, even when clouded
by periodic insanity, seeks to protect itself and society; a nd how society prevents her
from attaining that end:
There is a woman in this town who has six children and is expecting anot her.
Directly aft er the birth of a child, she goes insane, a raving maniac, and they send
her to the insane asylum. While she is gone, her home and children are cared for
by neighbors. After about six months, they discharge her and she comes home
and is in a family way again in a few months. Still the doctors will do nothing for her.
She is a well-educated woman and says if she would not have any more children,
she is sure she could be entirely free from these insane spells.
If you will send me one of your pamphlets, I will give it to her and several others
equally deserving.
Hoping you will see fit to grant my request, I remain, etc.
The very word “syphilis” brings a shudder to anyone who is familiar with the horrors
of the malady. Not only in the suffering brought to the victim himself and in the danger of
infecting others, but in the dire legacy of helplessness and disease which is left to the off-
spring of the syphilitic, is this the most destructive socially, of all “plagues.” Here is a let-
ter, which as a criticism to national waste and to contraceptives, defies comment:
I was left without a father when a girl of fourteen years old. I was the oldest child of
five. My mother had no means of support except her two hands, so we worked at
anything we could, my job being nurse girl at home while mother worked most of
the time, as she could earn more money than I could, for she could do harder work.
I wasn’t very strong and finally after two years my mother got so tired and worn
out trying t o make a living for so many, she married again, and as she married a
poor man, we children were not much be tter off. At the age of seventeen I mar-
ried a ma n, a brakeman on the—Railroad, who was eleven years older than I. He
drank some and was a very frail-looking man, but I was very ignorant of the world
and did not think of anything but making a home for myself and husband. After
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