The Pivot of Civilization
e 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 hu-
man 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 civ-
ilization, in any true sense of the word, is based upon the control and guid-
ance 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 aca-
demic 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,
3 MARGARET SANGER
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 any-
thing new of the fundamental problems of working men, working women,
working children? Something, perhaps, but not those great central prob-
lems 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 con-
clusions are tested by experience. Observation of facts about you, intimate
subjective reaction to such facts, generate in your mind certain fundamental
convictions, -truths you can ignore no more than you can ignore such truths
as come as the fruit of bitter but valuable personal experience.
Regarding myself, I may say that my experience in the course of the past
twelve or fifteen years has been of a type to force upon me certain convic-
tions that demand expression. For years I had believed that the solution
of all our troubles was to be found in well-defined programmes of politi-
cal and legislative action. At first, I concentrated my whole attention upon
these, only to discover that politicians and law-makers are just as confused
and as much at a loss in solving fundamental problems as anyone else. And
I am speaking here not so much of the corrupt and ignorant politician as
of those idealists and reformers who think that by the ballot society may be
led to an earthly paradise. They may honestly desire and intend to do great
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