The Social Aspects of Birth Control (1916)¶

Author: Emma Goldman Type: Primary Source · Argumentative Essay Source: Mother Earth, vol. 11 (April 1916), pp. 468–475 — public domain. Full text at The Anarchist Library. Era/Period: US History — Unit 1 (Industrial Revolution & Progressive Era) US Standards: US.6_12.5 · US.6_12.3 · US.6_12.6

Read It¶

Key selections — full text public domain. Read the full essay for the complete argument.

Goldman argues that a woman must be the one to decide whether and when to have children — that this decision is the foundation of her freedom and dignity:

Surely she ought to be in a position to decide how many children she should bring into the world, whether they should be brought into the world by the man she loves and because she wants the child, or should be born in hatred and loathing.

She connects the question of birth control to economics and power — arguing that keeping working-class families large keeps working-class people trapped:

Nothing so binds the workers to the block as a brood of children and that is exactly what the opponents of Birth Control want.

She makes a broader systemic claim, tying reproduction to war and to the economic order of her time:

Capitalism cannot do without militarism and since the masses of people furnish the material to be destroyed in the trenches and on the battlefield, capitalism must have a large race.

And she frames birth control as a matter of women's basic physical and mental health:

It is for this reason that women should have the knowledge that would enable her to recuperate during a period of from three to five years between each pregnancy, which alone would give her physical and mental well-being.

What This Text Is About¶

Emma Goldman, seated portrait Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was arrested in 1916 for publicly lecturing on birth control, which was illegal to discuss under the Comstock laws. Image public domain.

In 1916, distributing information about contraception was a crime in the United States under the federal Comstock Act. Emma Goldman was arrested and jailed for giving public lectures on the subject — this essay is drawn from that campaign. Her argument runs on several levels at once: that a woman cannot be free if she cannot control her own body; that forcing poor women to bear children they cannot support keeps working families in poverty; and that the powerful had reasons of their own — cheap labor, soldiers for war — to keep birth control illegal. Goldman here is a case study in Progressive-Era reform from outside the system: she didn't lobby Congress, she broke the law in public to force the issue. Read alongside the mainstream reformers of USH-01, she shows the most confrontational end of the reform spectrum.

A note on reading this text: birth control and reproduction are studied here as a historical and political argument from 1916. The goal is to analyze how Goldman makes her case and what it reveals about power and reform in the Progressive Era — not to advocate a position. Reasonable people held, and hold, many views on this subject; your job is to weigh the argument as evidence.

ELA Standards This Connects To¶

R.9 — Goldman stacks several kinds of appeal: an appeal to individual dignity, an economic argument, and a systemic argument about who benefits from the law. Students identify each strand and evaluate which does the most work.
R.7 — Word choice: phrases like "born in hatred and loathing" and "binds the workers to the block" are chosen to shock. Analyze how her diction is engineered to move a 1916 audience.
W.4 — Argument writing: "Whose argument for reform was more effective — one that worked within the law, or one that broke it to make a point?"

US.6_12.5 — Goldman's birth-control campaign is a significant Progressive-Era contribution — part of the long fight that would later run through Margaret Sanger and the founding of the modern reproductive-rights debate. Students analyze her role and influence.
US.6_12.3 — Cause and effect: Goldman links reproduction to poverty, labor, and war, arguing that a change in one produces changes in the others. Students test the strength of those causal claims.
US.6_12.6 — Connect past to present: the legal question Goldman was jailed over (who may decide about reproduction, and who gets to make the rules) is one of the most contested issues in American life today.

Key Vocabulary¶

Term	Definition
Birth control	Methods of preventing pregnancy — a term popularized in exactly this era; illegal to publicize in 1916
Comstock Act	An 1873 federal law that made it a crime to send "obscene" material — including contraception information — through the mail
Militarism	The belief that a country should maintain a strong military and use it readily — which Goldman ties to the demand for a large population
Capitalism	An economic system based on private ownership and profit — which Goldman argues depends on a large, cheap labor supply
Autonomy	The right of a person to govern themselves and make their own decisions about their own life and body

Key Passage¶

Surely she ought to be in a position to decide how many children she should bring into the world… — The Social Aspects of Birth Control (1916)

This is the individual-dignity core of the argument, stated plainly. Everything else in the essay — the economics, the critique of war, the attack on the Comstock law — is built to defend this one claim about self-determination. Students can use it to test Goldman against later reformers: is this the same argument Steinem makes in 1970, or a different one?

Studio Ideas¶

"Jailed for a Pamphlet" — EQ: When is breaking the law the right way to change it? · Standard: US.6_12.5 + Unit 1 · Demo Mode: Written Assessment (analyze Goldman's strategy of public civil disobedience against the Comstock Act)
"The Body and the System" — EQ: How does Goldman connect one woman's private decision to the whole economic system? · Standard: US.6_12.3 + Unit 1 · Demo Mode: Extended Writing (evaluate her cause-and-effect chain from reproduction to poverty to war)
"Then and Now" — EQ: Why is the question Goldman was jailed over still unsettled a century later? · Standard: US.6_12.6 + Unit 6 · Demo Mode: Verbal Conversation or Multimedia (trace the argument from 1916 to the present, balancing multiple perspectives)

Why This Is Relevant Today?¶

The specific legal fight Goldman was jailed for — whether the government could criminalize even information about contraception — was settled in stages over the 20th century, but the deeper question she raised has never left American politics: who decides about reproduction, and where is the line between an individual's autonomy and the community's authority to make rules? Goldman's essay is valuable in a history classroom precisely because it shows how old this debate is, how tangled it has always been with economics and class, and how the same set of facts can be read completely differently depending on your starting assumptions. Studying it well means being able to reconstruct her argument accurately and evaluate it fairly — the exact skill a citizen needs to think clearly about any contested public issue, then or now.