Woman of Valor by Ellen Chesler Read Free Book Online Page B

number of workers in any given industry. Marxism is too “flattering” a doctrine, she wrote, because “it teaches the laborer that all the fault is with someone else, that he is the victim of circumstances, and not even a partner in the creation of his own and his children’s misery.”
    Still searching for a catechism, whatever her disillusion with Marxist orthodoxy—whatever her lip service to a new intellectual rigor—she argued once more for the fundamental relationship of sex and reproduction to the economic organization of society. Birth control would not simply promise fewer children and the potential of a higher standard of living. It was, in her newest phrase, an “entering wedge” for educating humanity in matters of long-term health and hygiene, which would totally transform their lives. 19
    Most important, Margaret attempted to further refine her argument for the essential compatibility of a progressive vision embracing both social reform and eugenics. Again paraphrasing Ellis, she took issue with conventional opposition to contraception on the part of conservatives worried about the reproduction of the “fitter” classes. There would be no “cradle-competition” between the haves and the have-nots, she insisted, because all women, rich and poor alike, would voluntarily limit their childbearing when presented with the option to do so. The one exception—the one population for whom enforced contraception might be necessary—were the physically or mentally incompetent, who could not themselves understand the benefits of smaller families. She declared her support for “negative” eugenics, or the weeding out of this “unfit” population, though she disdained the idea of promoting fertility, or “positive” eugenics.
    The woman whose own autobiography so tellingly advertises the births of her ten siblings “without a blotch or a blemish” thus refused to consider that the handicapped may also be worthy, that the rights of the individual, in any event, must reign supreme in a truly democratic society. Nor did she question the reliability and objectivity of standardized methods of determining mental capacity, which were then just becoming much the rage. She was, of course, not alone in these oversights, nor in her willingness to sacrifice the individual rights of the most defenseless to what was being widely touted as the greater social good. Eugenics, for the moment, remained popular with a wide range of progressive thinkers who simply failed to anticipate that the enforcement of hereditarian reforms was likely to foster the very discrimination by ethnicity, race, and class that they denounced and worked elsewhere to combat. Like Ellis, Margaret was intent that biology be incorporated into social reform as a theoretical matter, but never really came to terms with how to do so in practice.
    In The Pivot of Civilization she condemned the class bias of many eugenic writings and claimed that beyond “gross” examples of mental deficiency, there is no way of deciding the question of fitness in a democratic society. She maintained instead that birth control is where a true eugenic approach to social change must begin—that only controlled fertility can bring about the education and economic opportunity for women through which responsible motherhood is achieved. The initiative for individual and racial regeneration must “come from within….” she wrote; “it must be autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from without.” She argued that the great majority of women, once given the opportunity to control their fertility, would willingly accept the responsibility to do so—that the fecundity of the uneducated and impoverished most often resulted from a lack of access to reliable contraception, not from poor motivation or self-control. And she maintained this conviction throughout her life.
    Indeed,