Annotations for Interviewee: Sanger

Well, Mr. Wallace, it's hard to say that any one thing has made one do this or that. I think that from the very beginning -- I came from a large family, my mother died young, eleven children, that made an impression on me as a child. I was a trained nurse, went among the people.

I saw, women, who asked to have some means whereby they wouldn't have to have another pregnancy too early, after the last child, the last abortion, which many of them had. So there are numerous things that are, one after the other, that really made you feel that you had to do something.

She was born a Catholic, yes. In Ireland.

No I don't think I had anything of the kind in mind-- I was -- I was what I would call a born humanitarian. I don't like to see people suffer, I don't like to see cruelty even to this day, and in nursing you see a great deal of cruelty and unnecessary suffering. At that time, there was no opposition as far as the church was concerned, any church. It was mainly the law, the Federal Law and State Laws, that one had to--to think of. The church was not in my mind at all.

Well, I don't remember that letter -- (LAUGHS) -- how it was written, but I think it was not question of a -- a marriage at all, there's a certain satisfaction in a --doing something that is going to alleviate the sufferings of women, in particular, and I was quite a feminist, at the time.

...and a -- yes -- and a -- I naturally didn't want to see women take all the suffering of child-bearing and of pregnancies. So it was a pleasure in a sense to think that you were striking at an archaic law, which it was..

...it was put on the statute books by Anthony Comstock some years ago, and a no one had stood up against it and no one had--had tried to change the laws, and at that time not even a doctor had a right to use the United States Mail in common carriers for books, for learning, for anything that he had to do with this question. It was considered obscene. The whole question was considered obscene.

Well, not entirely, the population question is a great concern today and the a the rate at which the birth - births come-in to the a we're saving them now - at one time the children died…they didn't have the food. Today our population all over the world is getting certainly better consideration and better conditions than they had at the time when I was there. I went to every country because I was invited and a--I didn't spread--go into the country myself--I was invited to go to Japan and to speak there, have eight lectures on the question of Birth Control and Peace.

Say it again.

Well, I think that Birth Control--if you keep the population more or less static until you pick up your resources, certainly you'll-- keep--prevent their starving.

Well, picking up the resources there's just a limit to that too. There's just so much -- take Japan -- and she cannot feed they've had the best experts come there when MacArthur was there and the best experts would say that they have twenty million more people than they can feed; she's got to be fed outside in some -- in some way. She's got to have that kind of help if she's going to keep from fighting.

Oh, Mr. Wallace, you hear so many fantastic things what can happen, what may happen -- ah -- this and that --I've heard it for the last thirty years, at any rate, of what could be done but it's never done, and the thing is what is it now -- what have we got today…A very distinguished woman spoke to me about Arizona and she said I wish you wouldn't talk about population --she said all the population in the United States could be put in one state and I said what state -- she said Arizona.

I said did you ever hear of caliche--she didn't know if I was talking about a delicatessen or what. I said well, caliche is harder than any rock, and it's usually about three inches below the ground, where-- it looks beautiful it looks as if you could have food, it looks as if you could have corn or wheat or cotton--but as a matter of fact you have to dynamite caliche out of the ground again in order to have a little shrub have a little grass or a few flowers so many problems that-- when it comes to that. And the demographers, I never heard of any one that would agree with that. That we could have another in the world. Another, another third.

Well, I think that the opposition is mainly from the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

The hierarchy...

They come to all of our clinics just the same as the non-Catholics do. Exactly the same.

Well, it's very wrong, it's not normal it's -- it has the wrong attitude towards marriage, toward love, toward the relationships between men and women.

I disagree with that a hundred percent.

My feeling is that love and attraction between men and women, in many cases the very finest relationship has nothing to do with bearing a child. It's secondary. Many, many times and we know that --you see your birth rates and you can talk to people who have very happy marriages and they're not having babies every year. Yes, I think that's a celibate attitude...

Oh, I certainly do take issue with it and I think it's untrue and I think it's unnatural.

... It's an unnatural attitude to take --how do they know? I mean, after all, they're celibates.They don't know love, they don't know marriage, they know nothing about bringing up children nor any of the marriage problems of life, and yet they speak to people as if they were God.

Not if they were intelligent people and they had some reason for thinking of children as a responsibility, or they -- some disease that they might have, that they wouldn't like to pass on to a child and I think it would be a very unselfish attitude for them to take if there is a disease.

I don't think it's a misuse. I think if they're intelligent adults that they must know what they want, they must manage their lives themselves and certainly there's nothing birth control--than there is in other things that you might deny yourself.

You'd have to ask a Catholic that, I couldn't say what their motive is.

Well, I don't have much to do with the--with the hierarchy and I know that the people that come to our organization and want to have the same methods, or whatever it is that one can have, to prevent a pregnancy that those women say to us--I, we ask their religion very often and they say, "I am a Catholic, I was raised in the Catholic Church, on this my Church is wrong, on this, this is the the one thing, I will never be anything else but my Church is wrong on this one thing" and that is said over and over and over again. So what the motive is...

I don't care to, thank you.

Well, simply because I don't think that a -- that the Church has changed in its attitude, some of the hierarchy have changed their attitude. You can't say the same thing that you might have said a year ago or two years ago as to your belief, as to your opinions. I'm not going to --

I've read it.

Well, if you read their papers, where they point out Boston, that that's what had happened in Boston in Massachusetts. They had simply out-bred the Protestants and they're -- they -- in Boston in Massachusetts they have control. I read that in their own papers

Alright, I have no quote what they do, so they...I think that the question in my mind is that they may do and order their own people to do as they wish but I object to their having the same rules for people who are not of the same religion.

I doubt it.

Certainly.

Where was it taken from.

I doubt it. I don't believe I ever made such a remark.

Well, there's many reasons of course -- if we had more records of it to go on with Christianity and I think I was speaking of Havelock Ellis as having clarified the question of homosexuals...making the thing a --not exactly a perverted thing, but a thing that a person is born with different kinds of eyes, different kinds of structures and so forth...that he didn't make all homosexuals perverts--and I thought he helped clarify that to the medical profession and to the scientists of the world as perhaps one of the first ones to do that. That was one of things that I meant in that.

That they have a right to say --

I suppose they have a right. And they certainly do it -- but so have the others and yet they're only 45% of the population -- and that is not the majority.

Certainly. I'd have no objection to their having a say about it--but I think we should have the same right. I say "we", I mean non-Catholics .

Honestly, -- where are these strange things coming from -- that I said them (LAUGHS)..I should like to know when.

Well, I don't think I put it quite that way.

Yes..

Well, I have a different attitude about--the divine--I feel that we have divinity within us, and the more we express the good part of our lives, the more the divine within us expresses itself. I suppose I would call myself an Episcopalian by religion and there's a--many other, if you travel around the world you get quite a bit of the feeling of all--all religions--have so much alike in the divine part of our own being. And I suppose you just couldn't just put that into a book or you couldn't put it to a phrase or a sentence.

I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world--that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they're born. That to me is the greatest sin -- that people can -- can commit..

What-what would they be?

Well, I'm not going to specify what I think is a sin. I stated what I think is the worst sin.

I don't know about infidelity, that has many personalities to it--and what a person's own belief is--you can't, I couldn't generalize on any of those things as being sins.

Well, I naturally think murder, whether it's a sin or not, is a terrible act.

Well, as a great many of our clinics are including, in the work that they do in birth control clinics, having marriage counseling. So when the woman or the man come and complain that their marriage is on the skids--we invite them to come and have special talks with some of our psychiatrists or others who are making a study of that all over the country. Where we have about five hundred clinics -- they almost all include marriage counseling and marriage erection.

For different people, yes...it certainly was for me, and for my husband. We had a very happy marriage...he had different friends than I had and--I don't believe in forcing, after all we were two adults, forcing your friends on another person when they have an entirely different outlook--it worked out very well.

Would you like to see them?

(LAUGHS).

Five boys and a girl in that family.

Two girls.

And, Mr. Wallace, I've never smoked, but I'm going to begin and take up smoking and use Philip Morris as my... as the cigarette for me to take.