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ipanzica's review against another edition
5.0
A book that exposes the harsh reality and conditions that both poor and middle-class women and children were subjected to at the time. Some of the topics it covers are the lack of maternity leave, infant mortality rates, lack of childcare forcing women into almost slavelike lives, lack of sexual education, lack of any education, and child labor. Some of these harsh realities and conditions have been addressed and improved since the book was published, but most of these problems still exist on some type of level. For example, literacy rates have gone up significantly since then but the US is still lagging behind other countries in education.
Overall I find this book to be a must-read since while the topic is grim, it does inspire hope for the future. Since if we were able to make so much progress since the book was written, we can continue to make the world a better place for everyone to live in.
Overall I find this book to be a must-read since while the topic is grim, it does inspire hope for the future. Since if we were able to make so much progress since the book was written, we can continue to make the world a better place for everyone to live in.
schmidtmark56's review against another edition
1.0
The only redeemable thing about this document is its historical significance and the preface by H. G. Wells, which excellently fleshes out the then-dichotomy of premodernism vs modernism (now a trichotomy in premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism). The statistics Sanger utilizes are deadly outdated and, like all statistics, almost invariably point to different causes than the statistician claims. The fact that people today still don't know better (and that correlation =/= causation) should be surprising, but isn't.
Other than some lines of thought and phrases which modern eugenicists (birth control/abortion advocates) use, such as "my body my choice", "birth control as imperative to women's rights/independence", and "unwanted children are worth less than wanted children", the book offers little of prescient value.
Her ultimate thesis of eugenics being a necessary philosophy for the modern age was not only utterly invalidated in the genocide of the 20th century, but also was eradicated a mere 30 years after her book was published by adequate child nutrition and a stable sociocultural base that solidified during in the 1950s. Regardless of what you think about women's rights at that time, it proved that all the statistics she throws around in here were irrelevant, as no eugenics program was in place by that time, but birth defects and educational levels both improved radically. This can easily be attributed to increased nutrition and medicines, including vaccines.
Despite what the postmodern progressive might hope, Sanger isn't the tolerant champion for equality that they would want. She's openly ableist, anti-socialist, anti-Marxist, anti-Christian, and blindly pro-science, ultimately believing it will bring us to the utopia. I wonder what she thought in the wake of the second world war, which she lived through; it would be curious to know if she held to her thinly veiled disdain for the "ever-widening margin of biological waste", as she so kindly refers to those unwanted "burdens" on society. Her anger against these subgroups she hates (of which she wisely doesn't mention minority races, which she did detest) is often veiled, and one must see what she is implying to understand the full extent of her ideology.
"It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant."
She most often uses a form of doublespeak/doublethink which ideologues excel at. She makes the common enough modernist blunder of claiming she's using exclusively "reason" and "science" when her views are so driven by a disgust mechanism that she's really at bottom no better than the emotional theists she is rebelling against. She proclaims "No more fear! No more hatred!" ...except fear of the malformed and hatred of the unwanted...
Sanger also makes use of a theologically inept theologian who agrees with her, and this was perhaps the most laughable part of the entire book:
"Dean Inge believes Birth Control is an essential part of Eugenics, and an essential part of Christian morality. On this point he asserts: "We do wish to remind our orthodox and conservative friends that the Sermon on the Mount contains some admirably clear and unmistakable eugenic precepts. `Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit, neither can a good tree bring forth evil fruit. Every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.' We wish to apply these words not only to the actions of individuals, which spring from their characters, but to the character of individuals, which spring from their inherited qualities. This extension of the scope of the maxim seems to me quite legitimate. Men do not gather grapes of thorns. As our proverb says, you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. If we believe this, and do not act upon it by trying to move public opinion towards giving social reform, education and religion a better material to work upon, we are sinning against the light, and not doing our best to bring in the Kingdom of God upon earth.""
At a few points she literally uses the same pest language as Hitler (we have commissions on controlling pests, why not controlling eugenics?). Thank god for WWII, because it invalidated explicit eugenics for the forseeable future. It showed how the constant howling of "slippery slopes" from the conservatives and religious was, at least in this case, no fallacy, but a deadly possibility, one that was much more likely than anyone could have dreamed, because it did happen and culminated in the largest single loss of life in history of the world. Anyone who still seriously flirts with eugenics, "right to death", or any other nihilistic aberration should be laughed out of the room. If we allow those ideas to flourish after everything the human race has been through in the past century, the very concept of ethics, on as shaky of ground as it currently stands, will all but disappear, and the legalization of suicide and the culture of death will ultimately lead us to question the wrongness of murder, war, and genocide. Those hard lessons we only finally learned after the 20th century will be naught, and when Futurama's suicide booths become commonplace, don't complain that I didn't warn you.
Other than some lines of thought and phrases which modern eugenicists (birth control/abortion advocates) use, such as "my body my choice", "birth control as imperative to women's rights/independence", and "unwanted children are worth less than wanted children", the book offers little of prescient value.
Her ultimate thesis of eugenics being a necessary philosophy for the modern age was not only utterly invalidated in the genocide of the 20th century, but also was eradicated a mere 30 years after her book was published by adequate child nutrition and a stable sociocultural base that solidified during in the 1950s. Regardless of what you think about women's rights at that time, it proved that all the statistics she throws around in here were irrelevant, as no eugenics program was in place by that time, but birth defects and educational levels both improved radically. This can easily be attributed to increased nutrition and medicines, including vaccines.
Despite what the postmodern progressive might hope, Sanger isn't the tolerant champion for equality that they would want. She's openly ableist, anti-socialist, anti-Marxist, anti-Christian, and blindly pro-science, ultimately believing it will bring us to the utopia. I wonder what she thought in the wake of the second world war, which she lived through; it would be curious to know if she held to her thinly veiled disdain for the "ever-widening margin of biological waste", as she so kindly refers to those unwanted "burdens" on society. Her anger against these subgroups she hates (of which she wisely doesn't mention minority races, which she did detest) is often veiled, and one must see what she is implying to understand the full extent of her ideology.
"It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant."
She most often uses a form of doublespeak/doublethink which ideologues excel at. She makes the common enough modernist blunder of claiming she's using exclusively "reason" and "science" when her views are so driven by a disgust mechanism that she's really at bottom no better than the emotional theists she is rebelling against. She proclaims "No more fear! No more hatred!" ...except fear of the malformed and hatred of the unwanted...
Sanger also makes use of a theologically inept theologian who agrees with her, and this was perhaps the most laughable part of the entire book:
"Dean Inge believes Birth Control is an essential part of Eugenics, and an essential part of Christian morality. On this point he asserts: "We do wish to remind our orthodox and conservative friends that the Sermon on the Mount contains some admirably clear and unmistakable eugenic precepts. `Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit, neither can a good tree bring forth evil fruit. Every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.' We wish to apply these words not only to the actions of individuals, which spring from their characters, but to the character of individuals, which spring from their inherited qualities. This extension of the scope of the maxim seems to me quite legitimate. Men do not gather grapes of thorns. As our proverb says, you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. If we believe this, and do not act upon it by trying to move public opinion towards giving social reform, education and religion a better material to work upon, we are sinning against the light, and not doing our best to bring in the Kingdom of God upon earth.""
At a few points she literally uses the same pest language as Hitler (we have commissions on controlling pests, why not controlling eugenics?). Thank god for WWII, because it invalidated explicit eugenics for the forseeable future. It showed how the constant howling of "slippery slopes" from the conservatives and religious was, at least in this case, no fallacy, but a deadly possibility, one that was much more likely than anyone could have dreamed, because it did happen and culminated in the largest single loss of life in history of the world. Anyone who still seriously flirts with eugenics, "right to death", or any other nihilistic aberration should be laughed out of the room. If we allow those ideas to flourish after everything the human race has been through in the past century, the very concept of ethics, on as shaky of ground as it currently stands, will all but disappear, and the legalization of suicide and the culture of death will ultimately lead us to question the wrongness of murder, war, and genocide. Those hard lessons we only finally learned after the 20th century will be naught, and when Futurama's suicide booths become commonplace, don't complain that I didn't warn you.
missjackson's review against another edition
3.0
I had to read this for my women’s studies class. Other than the fact that Sanger was a blatant eugenist, it was an interesting read.
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