The pivot of civilization

The Pivot of Civilization

By Margaret Sanger

"The Birth Control Classic"

"Creator of the Organizations that Evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America"

Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins, September 14, 1879 - September 6, 1966, also known as Margaret Sanger Slee) was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control," opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

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 present time it is a test issue between two widely different interpretations of the word civilization, and of what is good in life and conduct. The way in which men and women range themselves in this controversy is more simply and directly indicative of their general intellectual quality than any other single indication. I do not wish to imply by this that the people who oppose are more or less intellectual than the people who advocate Birth Control, but only that they have fundamentally contrasted general ideas, --that, mentally, they are DIFFERENT. Very simple, very complex, very dull and very brilliant persons may be found in either camp, but all those in either camp have certain attitudes in common which they share with one another, and do not share with those in the other camp.

There have been many definitions of civilization. Civilization is a complexity of countless aspects, and may be validly defined in a great number of relationships. A reader of James Harvey Robinson's MIND IN THE MAKING will find it very reasonable to define a civilization as a system of society-making ideas at issue with reality. Just so far as the system of ideas meets the needs and conditions of survival or is able to adapt itself to the needs and conditions of survival of the society it dominates, so far will that society continue and prosper. We are beginning to realize that in the past and under different conditions from our own, societies have existed with systems of ideas and with methods of thought very widely contrasting with what we should consider right and sane to-day.

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