NARRATOR
Emma Goldman, in the early part of the twentieth century, became one of the most powerful voices in America for anarchism, feminism, the rights of working people. She lectured all over the country on women’s rights, on the theater of Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, on patriotism and war, and was arrested many times. She was jailed for opposing World War I and then was deported, under the personal supervision of J. Edgar Hoover. Here, in the year 1916, she addresses a courtroom where she has been charged with speaking about birth control.
EMMA GOLDMAN
Your Honor, I am charged with the crime of having given information to men and women as to how to prevent conception. For the last three weeks, every night before packed houses, a stirring social indictment is being played at the Candler Theater. I refer to “Justice” by John Galsworthy. The counsel for the Defense in summing up the charge against the defendant says among other things: “Your Honor: back of the commission of every crime, is life, palpitating life.”
Now what is the palpitating life back of my crime? I will tell you, Your Honor. According to the bulletin of the Department of Health, 30,000,000 people in America are underfed.
Your Honor: what kind of children do you suppose these parents can bring into the world. I will tell you: children so poor and anemic that they take their leave from this, our kind world, before their first year of life. In that way, 300,000 babies, according to the baby welfare association, are sacrificed in the United States every year. This, Your Honor, is the palpitating life which has confronted me for many years, and which is back of the commission of my crime.
After all, the question of birth control is largely a workingman’s question, above all a workingwoman’s question. She it is who risks her health, her youth, her very life in giving out of herself the units of the race. She it is who ought to have the means and the knowledge to say how many children she shall give, and to what purpose she shall give them, and under what conditions she shall bring forth life.
And this is true, not only because of what I say or may not say; there is much profounder reason for the tremendous growth and importance of birth control. The reason is conditioned in the great modern social conflict, or rather social war, I should say. A war not for military conquest or material supremacy, a war of the oppressed and disinherited of the earth against their enemies, capitalism and the state, a war for a seat at the table of life, a war for well-being, for beauty, for liberty. Above all this war is for a free motherhood and a joyous, playful, glorious childhood.