The Federal law concerned only printed literature. My own pamphlet had given the impression that the printed word was the best way to inform women, but the practical course of contraceptive technique I had taken in the Netherlands had shown me that one woman was so different from another in structure that each needed particular information applied to herself as an individual. Books and leaflets, therefore, should be of secondary importance. The public health way was through personal instruction in clinics.
A light had been kindled; so many invitations to address meetings in various cities and towns were sent me that I was not able to accept them all but agreed to as many as I could. It was no longer to be only a free speech movement, and I wanted also if possible to present this new idea of clinics to the country. If I could start them, other organizations and even hospitals might do the same. I had a vision of a “chain”—thousands of them in every center of America, staffed with specialists putting the subject on a modern scientific basis through research.
Many states in the West had already granted woman suffrage. Having achieved this type of freedom, I was sure they would receive clinics more readily, especially California which had no law against birth control. The same thing would follow in the East. As I told the Tribune, “I have the word of four prominent physicians that they will support me in the work.... There will be nurses in attendance at the clinic, and doctors who will instruct women in the things they need to know. All married women or women about to be married will be assisted free and without question.”
A splendid promise—but difficult to fulfill, as events were to prove.
Chapter Sixteen
HEAR ME FOR MY CAUSE
“Speak clearly if you speak at all.
Carve every word before you let it fall.”
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Once Amos Pinchot asked me how long it had taken me to prepare that first lecture I delivered on my three months’ trip across the country in 1916.
“About fourteen years,” I answered.