Legitimate fertility…. 346.5 303.9 255.0
Illegitimate fertility… 13.4 13.6 7.7
Rotterdam:
1880-2 1890-2 1900-2
Legitimate fertility…. 331.4 312.0 299.0
Illegitimate fertility… 17.4 16.5 13.1]
CHAPTER XVII
PROGRESS WE HAVE MADE
The silence of the centuries has been broken. The wrongs of woman and the rights of woman have found voices. These voices differ from all others that have been raised in woman's behalf. They are not the individual protests of great feminine minds, nor the masculine remedies for masculine oppression suggested by the stricken consciences of a few men. Great voices are heard, both of women and of men, but intermingled with them are millions of voices demanding freedom.
Let it be repeated that movements mothered by emancipated women are often deceptive in character. The demand for suffrage, the agitation against child labor, the regulation of working hours for women, the insistence upon mothers' pensions are palliatives all. Yet as woman's understanding develops and she learns to think at the urgence of her own inner nature, rather than at the dictates of men, she moves on from these palliatives to fundamental remedies. So at the crest of the wave of woman's revolt comes the movement for voluntary motherhood—not a separate, isolated movement, but the manifestation of a cosmic force—the force that moves the wave itself.
The walls of the cloister have fallen before the cries of a rising womanhood. The barriers of prurient puritanism are being demolished. Free woman has torn the veil of indecency from the secrets of life to reveal them in their power and their purity. Womanhood yet bound has beheld and understood. A public whose thoughts and opinions had been governed by men and by women engulfed in the old order has been shocked awake.
Sneers and jests at birth control are giving way to a reverent understanding of the needs of woman. They who to-day deny the right of a woman to control her own body speak with the hardihood of invincible ignorance or with the folly of those blind ones who in all ages have opposed the light of progress. Few there are to insist openly that woman remain a passive instrument of reproduction. The subject of birth control is being lifted out of the mire into which it was cast by puritanism and given its proper place among the sciences and the ideals of this generation. With this effort has come an illumination of all other social problems. Society is beginning to give ear to the promise of modern womanhood: "When you have ceased to chain me, I shall by the virtue of a free motherhood remake the world."