As I stood there the darkness faded. The sun came up and threw its reflection over the house tops. It was the dawn of a new day in my life also. The doubt and questioning, the experimenting and trying, were now to be put behind me. I knew I could not go back merely to keeping people alive.
I went to bed, knowing that no matter what it might cost, I was finished with palliatives and superficial cures; I was resolved to seek out the root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were vast as the sky.
Chapter Eight
I HAVE PROMISES TO KEEP
How were mothers to be saved? I went through many revolving doors, looked around, and, not finding what I was seeking, came out again. I talked incessantly to everybody who seemed to have social welfare at heart. Progressive women whom I consulted were thoroughly discouraging. “Wait until we get the vote. Then we’ll take care of that,” they assured me. I tried the Socialists. Here, there, and everywhere the reply came, “Wait until women have more education. Wait until we secure equal distribution of wealth.” Wait for this and wait for that. Wait! Wait! Wait!
Having no idea how powerful were the laws which laid a blanket of ignorance over the medical profession as well as the laity, I asked various doctors of my acquaintance, “Why aren’t physicians doing something?”
“The people you’re worrying about wouldn’t use contraception if they had it; they breed like rabbits. And, besides, there’s a law against it.”
“Information does exist, doesn’t it?”
“Perhaps, but I doubt whether you can find it. Even if you do, you can’t pass it on. Comstock’ll get you if you don’t watch out.”
In order to ascertain something about this subject which was so mysterious and so unaccountably forbidden, I spent almost a year in the libraries—the Astor, the Lenox, the Academy of Medicine, the Library of Congress, and dozens of others. Hoping that psychological treatises might inform me, I read Auguste Forel and Iwan Block. At one gulp I swallowed Havelock Ellis’ Psychology of Sex, and had psychic indigestion for months thereafter. I was not shocked, but this mountainous array of abnormalities made me spiritually ill. So many volumes were devoted to the exceptional, and so few to the maladjustments of normal married people, which were infinitely more numerous and urgent.
I read translations from the German in which women were advised to have more children because it could be proved statistically that their condition was improved by childbearing. The only article on the question I could discover in American literature was in the Atlantic Monthly by Edward Alsworth Ross of the University of Wisconsin, who brought to the attention of his readers the decline of the birth rate among the upper and educated classes and the increase among the unfit, the consequences of which were sure to be race suicide.