Margaret Sanger to the Fabian Society in London, England, in 1915. The speech merits special attention both because its manuscript is the oldest surviving example of Sanger's oratory and because it was the last set of public remarks delivered by Sanger from the stance of a radical socialist. Sanger delivered the speech at a time when she was relatively inexperienced at oratory and when her public image was evolving toward one that would allow her work to move forward more effectively. The speech offers a priceless glimpse, into Sanger's early development as a public speaker and social movement leader.
MARGARET HIGGINS SANGER (1879-1966) is immediately identifiable to a wide variety of people as the founder of Planned Parenthood. Oddly, however, it seems that she is recognized only rarely, even by specialists in communication, as a rhetor whose active speaking career spanned half a century.(n1) The purpose of this essay is to begin to correct this oversight by examining a speech of approximately 2,500 words made by Sanger on July 5, 1915, at Fabian Hall in London, England.(n2)

The Fabian Hall speech merits special attention for two reasons. First, the handwritten, pencil manuscript from which it was delivered is the oldest extant example of Sanger's speechmaking and our only record of her early, unalloyed socialist oratory. It provides us with a unique opportunity to "hear" Sanger speak from the stance of an unrestrained rebel, rather than from the relatively more genteel posture that characterizes her subsequent speeches. Second, the speech provides a unique glimpse of Sanger's early development as an orator, and it captures her talent for crafting the kind of fiery, caustic phrases with which her later work frequently would be peppered. At the same time, however, the Fabian Hall text provides evidence that Sanger had not yet learned how important it was to analyze and attempt to adapt to her audience in advance of a speaking occasion. As this essay demonstrates, Sanger lustily harangued the Fabian Society members, but probably persuaded them very little (if at all). Before the speech at Fabian Hall can be examined meaningfully, however, it is necessary to place it in the context of Sanger's earliest years of social activism and her development of a rhetorical persona that was appropriate to the movement which she aspired to lead.(n3)

MARGARET SANGER AND THE BIRTH OF THE UNITED STATES BIRTH CONTROL MOVEMENT
By the end of 1910, Sanger was active as a socialist lecturer, speaking to small groups of women about health issues. By 1912 she had become a regular columnist for The Call. In 1913 and 1914, she spent several months in Scotland and France, traveling with her husband and family. Along the way, she investigated the living and working conditions of the poor, began her study of birth control practices among European women and attempted, with little success, to shore up her increasingly unstable marriage.

In early 1914, Sanger took her children and returned to the United States ahead of her husband, who lingered for a while in Paris hoping to invigorate his fitful career as painter. Shortly after her arrival in New York City, Sanger and a group of friends "founded a little society, grandly titled the National Birth Control League."(n8) The society sold enough advance subscriptions to enable her to publish The Woman Rebel, a stridently socialist and feminist tabloid. The publication of the first issue in March, 1914, immediately renewed hostilities between Sanger and the United States postal authorities. The skirmishes had begun with the suppression of two series of articles which Sanger had written for

The Call in 1912-1913.
Two years later, during her first 1916 United States lecture tour, Sanger made a candid confession to her audience: "They tell me that it [The Woman Rebel] was too radical, badly written, hysterical, defiant, to all of which I plead guilty."(n9) She was happy to acknowledge the paper's shortcomings, because what it lacked in focus and polish was more than compensated for by the dramatic impact it had upon her career. Seven out of the first nine issues of The Woman Rebel were suppressed by the Post Office.(n10) The growing controversy about the tabloid culminated in August, 1914, when Sanger was arraigned on four criminal counts of violating the Comstock Act, which classified as obscene "every article or thing designated, adapted or intended for preventing conception...."(n11) The arraignment stimulated significant national publicity for Sanger and the birth control movement. That publicity was heightened even further when Sanger left behind her children and husband and fled to Europe in November, 1914, to avoid prosecution.

MARGARET SANGER AND THE EVOLUTION OF HER PUBLIC IMAGE

Sanger's flight set in motion a series of events and experiences which, in the opinion of historian Linda Gordon, influenced "the entire future course of birth control in the United States...."(n12) A full consideration of Sanger's year in Europe is beyond the scope of this essay, but summarizing a few of its most important features can sketch the outlines of the profound personal, professional, and rhetorical changes which it produced for Sanger.

First, Sanger traveled extensively in Spain and France with Lorenzo Portet, a Spanish revolutionary who was living in exile in Liverpool. She spent a significant amount of time talking with women in both countries about their birth control problems and methods. Sanger also carried on a passionate, but clandestine love affair with Portet, who was also married. By associating with Portet, Sanger may have absorbed strategies for controlling the focus of her public image, since he was remembered vividly by a contemporary as a person who "masked a revolutionary temperament with fastidious manners, much as he concealed his gun beneath an impeccably tailored suit."(n13)

Toward the end of her year of exile, Sanger became especially concerned that her affair with Portet might become widely known. Her husband was increasingly impatient with her refusal to return to the United States and, apparently, she feared that he might accuse her publicly of deserting her children and dallying irresponsibly in Europe. Such an accusation would have undermined Sanger's struggle to cultivate the appearance of being a devoted mother, unjustifiably persecuted by the United States government, who spent her lonely days in exile pining for her sons and daughter. As a result, Sanger even went so far as to write a letter to her husband and inform him coldly and directly that it would be her pleasure "to relieve you of any duty toward me which you might have at one time performed, and on the receipt of this letter you may feel privileged to send the three children to me on the first boat & consider your duties to them & to me ended for all time."(n14) Her husband anxiously declined the offer, but Ellen Chesler has pointed out that Sanger's conduct during this period was typical, since she "lived a profoundly unconventional life, but . . . traditional social sanctions always governed the public image she projected, if not her actual behavior."(n15)

After her initial visits to Spain and France with Portet, followed by a respite in England, Sanger spent several weeks in Holland, studying its sophisticated system of birth control clinics and education. The information and testimony she gathered during her observations became significant pieces of evidence that she would cite often in her later works. Upon her return to London from Holland, Sanger developed an intimate relationship with Havelock Ellis. Ellis was regarded internationally as an expert on human sexuality and psychology. He guided Sanger through a course of serious, systematic reading at the British Museum about birth control, human sexuality, and related topics. In addition to calculating the importance of Sanger's formal learning under the direction of such an influential mentor, it is also important to take into account the fact that she established a deeply nurturant bond with Ellis that would help to sustain both of them for many years and through many difficult times. The esteem with which Sanger regarded Ellis and his opinions may be especially important to understanding the development of her rhetorical persona. As Chesler has pointed out, Ellis made no secret of the fact that, from the beginning of his relationship with Sanger, he "strongly disapproved of her radical politics."(n16)
Given even the few examples selected for use in this essay, it seems clear that Sanger's studies, travels, and relationships during her European exile provided significant impetus for a shift in her political stance and her rhetorical tactics as an aspiring social movement leader. As Reed has summarized it, what Sanger learned and experienced in Europe moved her to change from "the woman rebel model she got from Emma Goldman to the nurse-mother lobbying among social and professional elites."(n17) One would expect for this sort of change in Sanger's public image to be reflected in her rhetoric. As this essay will demonstrate, her speech at Fabian Hall may have been the rhetorical fulcrum on which her shift in style was levered.
Unfortunately there is very little material, aside from Sanger's early written rhetoric, with which to compare the text of the Fabian Hall speech. There are no surviving manuscripts or notes of the remarks that Sanger delivered when she taught in New York City, in 1910-1911, on human reproduction, venereal disease, and women's health issues. There are two full speech manuscripts (and one possible fragment) that survive from her 1916 United States lecture tour,(n18) but those lectures enact the "nurse-mother" persona identified by Reed and others. The "Fabian Hall Speech, July 5, 1915," on the other hand, demonstrates no dulling of the sort of radical hyperbole that Sanger had wielded in 1914 in the pages of The Woman Rebel. The speech makes it clear, in other words, that the tempering influences of Portet, Ellis, and Sanger's other cultured British and European role models blossomed only after Margaret confronted her audience at Fabian Hall. She described them later as "quite different from the little Socialist gatherings of working women I had addressed at home."(n19)

Possibly Sanger's experience at Fabian Hall was instrumental in jolting her out of the radical, revolutionary rhetorical stance she had assumed since joining the Socialist Party in 1910. The next time that Sanger delivered anything other than casual, impromptu remarks to an audience was nine months after the Fabian Hall speech. After federal prosecutors capitulated in mid-February, 1916, and entered a nolle prosequi in The Woman Rebel case, Sanger took advantage of the national publicity and interest in birth control that was generated by the trial. She embarked on her first United States lecture tour in April, 1916. Throughout the tour (which took her, in just under 90 days, to 20 cities for 37 speaking engagements)(n20) she was mute about her socialist roots and leanings. Instead, she emphasized to reporters who covered her tour that she wanted them to remind their readers that she was first and foremost a loving mother of three children and also a trained nurse.(n21)

This "mother-nurse" persona(n22) at the lectern was undoubtedly born of necessity in the aftermath of the kind of inflammatory inventions which Sanger had created in The Woman Rebel and at Fabian Hall. The persona of an unregenerate socialist, or even an anarchist, had brought Sanger essential publicity and notoriety, but only at a significant cost. Sanger had ample opportunity to tally those costs during the tense and turbulent months after she returned from exile and awaited trial on The Woman Rebel charges. It must have become clear to her that clinging to her old persona would lead her to follow in the footsteps of Emma Goldman, who was being harassed, silenced, and jailed repeatedly (and who would be deported in 1919 and die in exile). Sanger reconstructed her image, so that it clashed less obviously with the political and social climate in the United States in 1916. That climate, of course, was even less hospitable to socialist and anarchist rhetoric than was England in 1915.

When Sanger toured in 1916, for example, she often spoke within a few days of visits by Teddy Roosevelt. The ax-President and hero of San Juan Hill was on the stump against Woodrow Wilson and loudly beating the drum for war preparedness. Roosevelt also was irrevocably and volubly opposed to birth control, which he called "race suicide."(n23) When Sanger stepped to the platform to address her largely female, middle-to-upper class audiences, therefore, she realized that she had to contend directly with the credibility of Roosevelt as well as a host of like-minded politicians and self-styled patriots. As Sanger remarked during an interview at her tour stop at Denver in May, 1916, "when a man of Colonel Roosevelt's personality and influence begins to talk, people, especially women, listen."(n24) Sanger's sensitivity to the consequences of her audiences' values, beliefs, and attitudes matured during the course of her 1916 tour, perhaps as a direct result of what she learned both on and off the platform while she carried her message from city to city. There is no evidence that she knew that sort of sensitivity, however, when she approached the task of speaking at Fabian Hall in 1915.

MARGARET SANGER AND THE FABIANS
Sanger's speech at Fabian Hall clearly deserves to be studied because it is the only verbatim record of her first efforts at public speaking on behalf of the movement which she aspired to lead. When considering the speech, however, it is essential to remember that although Sanger had some childhood training in declamation, debate and, acting, she was not an experienced orator in 1915.(n25) As was noted earlier in this essay, of course, she had delivered a series of socialist lectures five years earlier in New York City. They cannot be regarded as more than minimally influencing her development as a public speaker, however, aside from the fact that they apparently were well received by small, sympathetic audiences of immigrant women and Sanger's fellow socialists. Those lectures, in other words, were confidence building "success experiences."
Given her lack of experience, it is not surprising that Sanger seems to have ignored any consideration of the characteristics of her audience when she prepared her remarks for the Fabian Hall engagement. Instead, as an inexperienced speaker she concentrated on what she wanted to say, how she wanted to say it, and on her status as the speaker.

The Fabian Hall manuscript makes it clear that Sanger's objective for the speech (and, indeed, for most of her previous activities in England and around Europe) was to rally support for the fledgling United States birth control movement. Because of her inexperience as a speaker, it may be a mistake to view the Fabian Hall speech's shortcomings as some sort of calculated challenge to her audience's positions. Purposefully provoking hostile or cynical responses from the audience at Fabian Hall simply would have undermined ten months of effort on Sanger's part to win respect and support for the National Birth Control League and for the role she desired as the leader of the United States birth control movement. Whether purposefully sought or not, however, the response which Sanger apparently received from her audience seemed "a tremendous awakening."(n26)
When Sanger first embarked for England in November, 1914, she carried a letter of introduction to the Liverpool branch of the Fabian Society. On her first evening after debarking, she attended a Fabian lecture on the war.(n27) The Fabian Society was formed in London in January, 1884, by Edward Pease, Frank Podmore, and Hubert Bland, who had previously been members of a group called the "Fellowship of the New Life" (whose secretary was a young Havelock Ellis).(n28) Pease and his companions had found the Fellowship to be too spiritually oriented for their more pragmatic political tastes. They withdrew from it to establish a new society whose name "derived from a dubious political reference to the Roman general Fabious Cunctator, whose tactics in his campaign against Hannibal were supposedly both cautious and forthright."(n29)
The Fabian Society membership rolls soon included such notable names as those of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, who had made a courageous defense of contraception when they were prosecuted in 1877 for republishing Charles Knowlton's 1832 tract on methods of birth control, Fruits of Philosophy: or, The Private Companion of Young Married People. Their case, which was reversed on appeal, won widespread but short-lived support for Neo-Malthusian doctrine from British liberals.

Alice Vickery and her son, Dr. C. V. Drysdale, and his wife, Bessie, were the core that sustained the Neo-Malthusian Society at the time when Sanger reached England. As Chesler has noted, they "were lonely voices for their cause and understandably, therefore, gave enthusiastic welcome to a beleaguered American convert."(n30) Among the boons they secured for Sanger were her introduction to Havelock Ellis and, in July, 1915, the opportunity to lecture at London's Fabian Hall.
If Sanger's memories of the Fabian Hall speech are accurate, even though they are written over twenty years later in her autobiography, then it appears that she may have prepared for that audience on the basis of the meager impression that "these representatives of nearly every social and civic organization in London, had the rationalist attitude and preferred to listen to principles and theories."(n31) She also remembered that when she surveyed the lecture hall, the "atrocious and hideous English hats gave it an intellectual and highly respectable air."(n32)
As the discussion below will indicate, when Sanger stepped to the Fabian Hall lectern she must have been blissfully ignorant of the significant differences between her old auditors, with their susceptibility to the inflammatory locutions of the Industrial Workers of the World, and her new audience, whose reserved demeanor signaled a traditional Fabianist attitude toward outside lecturers. Fabian Society member and historian George Bernard Shaw had summed up that attitude near the turn of the century:
[W]e contracted the invaluable habit of freely laughing at ourselves which has always distinguished us, and which has saved us from becoming hampered by the gushing enthusiasts who mistake their own emotions for public movements. . . We knew that a certain sort of oratory was useful for "stoking up" public meetings; but we needed no stoking up, and, when any orator tried the process on us, soon made him understand that he was wasting his time and ours. I, for one, should be very sorry to lower the intellectual standard of the Fabian by making the atmosphere of its public discussions the least bit more congenial to stale declamation that it is at present.(n33)

There is nothing in the accounts of the Fabian Society to indicate that it had either lowered its intellectual standards or ameliorated its long-standing attitude toward "stale declamation" by 1915. Had Sanger known its history better, she might have styled her lecture at Fabian Hall differently. The substance of her speech also makes it clear that she was painfully unaware of three important features of the Fabian Society: its female members' commitment to suffrage; its long-standing distaste for the proletariat; and its concern about declining birth rates.(n34)
Sanger introduced her speech by disclaiming any special knowledge of her topic, except that which might derive from her experiences as a nurse. She also made an unfocused, ambiguous statement of the purpose of her lecture: "I simply wish to show that there is a special side of our present day propaganda which should receive more of our attention...."(n35) She then closed her introduction with a hyperbolic claim that must have been intended to shore up her socialist credentials. She told her listeners that she was "rocked in the cradle of socialism--for my father was one of the Early pioneers of Socialist thot in [the] USA."(n36)

After a brief, anecdotal digression that highlighted the "world famous Puritanism" of the United States while lampooning the monarchy of Spain,(n37) Sanger moved to her first major theme: the liberation of women. She recalled for her audience a decade of "tremendous awakening in all civilized countries among women,"(n38) an awakening manifested in the work of two groups: the "Votes for Women Groups" and the "Feminist Groups."(n39) Sanger then expressed her disdain for the former group and her view that "fortunately the working girl has not been greatly enthused by this propaganda."(n40) She attacked the "Votes for Women" advocates by asserting that "their vision of life goes as high as obtaining political positions for women now today & aspiring to the lofty attitude of police women, detectives, police [commissioner], etc."(n41) She argued for the negative consequences of this "vision of life" by offering three examples. First, she recounted the brutality of Chicago policewomen during a cloak maker's strike, where "the working girls found to their great surprise that the policewoman's club hurt just as much swung from the fair hands of her own sex."(n42) Second, she chronicled some of the "cruelties" brought into the women's prison system by New York City Police Commissioner Katharine B. Davis, such as refusing "to allow inmates to receive outside meals until they were weak and ill," and concluded that "today there is little hope from the hands of a woman."(n43) Third, Sanger shared "a letter from a friend" in California who told her that "at the last election . . . the women had gone mad on prohibition[,] that they were going to tie the state up so dry, that a working man would have to pay five shillings for a perscription to keep a pint of cider vinegar in the house."(n44) Sanger wrapped up her trio of examples with a curt dismissal, "So much for Votes for Women." She attempted to blunt her attack, however, through a codicil: "Its not that I deplore votes for women for certainly if votes are good for men they are good for women too. But the vision of these women is too narrow & women as police matrons etc. are the same tools in the system as the men are so long as this system [remains]."(n45)

Sanger's pointed disdain for the "Votes for Women Groups" signals her ignorance of the fact that in England "the early Suffrage movement was mainly Socialist in origin: most of the first leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union were or had been members either of the Fabian Society or of the I.L.P. [Independent Labor Party], and it may almost be said that all the women of the Society joined one or more of the Suffrage Societies which for the next seven years [1908-1915] played so large a part in national politics."(n46) Such women, along with the men who supported and shared in their activism, would scarcely have found anything inviting in Sanger's curt dismissal of the importance of the suffrage movement, her lopsided portrayal of it as having low and often masculinist aims, and her assertion that it was fortunate that "the working girl has not been greatly enthused by this propaganda."(n47)

Having dispensed with the "Votes for Women Group," Sanger turned to a consideration of the "Feminist" groups. She lauded this movement and identified the unifying concern of these "awakened women" as being "one of the first steps toward Womans emancipation and future development--the ownership & control over her own body."(n48) In almost the same breath, however, she lamented, "this movement like all other big vital shots has been cut up and narrowed down to such a degree that it is scarcely recognized as Feminism...."(n49) Sanger then launched a virulent attack upon United States feminists. The attack essentially duplicates, in both tone and substance, the disdain expressed by Sanger in a piece, "The New Feminists," which had appeared sixteen months earlier on the front page of the first issue of The Woman Rebel.

In the tabloid, Sanger had ridiculed the "apologetic tone .... of the first and second mass meetings held at Cooper Union on the 17th and 20th of February last."(n50) She found the ideas "very old and time-worn": "The "right to work," the "right to ignore fashions," the "right to keep her own name," the "right to organize," the "right of the mother to work"; all these so-called rights fail to arouse enthusiasm.... It is evident they represent a middle class woman's movement; an echo, but a very weak echo, of the English constitutional suffragists. Consideration of the working woman's freedom was ignored."(n51)

In her Fabian Hall speech, Sanger omitted any praise of the English suffragists and she scorned the United States' group because "it was Feminism in name only" and because "these women--wanted the right to work; the right to ignore fashions; the right to keep her own name, & such poor longings of a bourgeois class suffering from loss of vitality."(n52) She contrasted their concerns with the plight of "the working girl" and scorned the "blue stocking prudes" because when she "suggested that the basis of feminism was a womans right to be an un-married mother--a stony silence surrounded them & they drew aside their skirts less they be defiled by such shots."(n53) Having tossed off this argument ad hominem, Sanger dispensed with the feminists in the same curt tone with which she had dispatched the suffragists: "So much for the feminists whose program had no place for the working womans development, or no thot of her emancipation...."(n54)

Much of Sanger's ire toward feminists can probably be traced to an incident just prior to her publication of The Woman Rebel. Chesler mentions the rebuff that Sanger received, upon returning to New York from Europe in 1914, from "a feminist group called Heterodoxy, whose elite membership included Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Crystal Eastman, and Henrietta Rodman."(n55) The group rejected the narrow agenda of the suffragists, as did Sanger. She hoped to convince them, therefore, to endorse a model for birth control activism that would unite women across class lines. Heterodoxy rejected her overtures, however, since they were "perhaps reluctant to associate with her avowed radicalism in politics and social behavior, perhaps skeptical of her lack of education and her erratic emotional behavior."(n56)
Sanger was stung by this rejection. In her 1916 lecture tours, she lumped Heteredoxy with the suffragists and recast the tale so as to make herself a necessarily impatient and moral visionary:

I hurried back to America to urge women here to help me to do this important work. I asked several prominent women, suffragists, feminists, and others, whom I knew not only believe in the idea of birth control but practiced it. I requested these women to help me to do this work which I thought would strike at the root of the evil. I tried to get fifty women to go on record with me to make a test case in the courts but I was told to wait until we got the vote, I was told to wait until I became better known, but the cries of thousands of suffering women would not let me wait.(n57)

At Fabian Hall, Sanger did not bother to develop any such heroic narrative. She simply dismissed the suffragists and the feminists from her rhetorical stage. In other words, the two groups which she characterized as her antagonists were simply "straw figures." Sanger portrayed them in the ways which made it the easiest for her to ridicule and defeat them. Having gotten the suffragists and the feminists out of her way, Sanger then plucked a third straw figure from the wings and railed against it for the rest of her speech. The hapless villain was "the Master Class or the boss--who has subtly & silently instituted in most all the large shops and stores where many women work--a Welfare Society, which so far has been a wonderful tool in the hands of the boss to blind the workers to their slavery."(n58)

Sanger's unrestrained championing of the working class signals another lapse in her analysis of the Fabian Hall audience. In 1919, the Fabians would amend their charter "to declare for the first time that the Society was `a constituent of the Labour Party,'(n59) a move which meant that they "threw in their lot with the unions and the provincial enthusiasts."(n60) In 1915, however, the proletariat was of little interest to the Society's members: "For three decades the Fabians had kept aloof from the working-class movement, arguing that they were independents who had a special role to play in promoting collectivism among the middle classes."(n61) Sanger's attack on the "poor longings of a bourgeois class suffering from loss of vitality,"(n62) therefore, was an insult (whether intended to be so or not) which would have done little to stimulate her audience's identification and empathy with her stance. In writing about "Fabian tactics" in his history of the early years of the Fabian Society, George Bernard Shaw archly noted, "We have never advanced the smallest pretension to represent the working-classes of this country."(n63) On the basis of Sanger's vitriolic criticism of the "Master Class," it is evident that she was ignorant of this stance.

Sanger detailed the machinations of the Master Class' Welfare Society, to which working women paid "$10 weekly out of their wages"(n64) and from which "they receive medical attention when they are ill etc."(n65) She asserted that while one nurse kept the women healthy enough to work efficiently, another nurse "dresses up poorly like the girls themselves & goes among them"(n66) and "keeps her fingers on the pulse of the shop to see there will be no strikes."(n67) The working women also heard lectures twice a week whose "key note . . . is to inject into these girls a slave morality."(n68) Having been taught to "rise & bow to your master & show deference to his authority over you," the women became "a tame, lifeless spiritless mass, without personality or life. . ."(n69)
Sanger attacked the oppression engineered by the "boss class" by arguing that "the working girl agrees only to sell her labor to the boss--not her morality.... She's never to forget that there is a war constantly going on . . . [,] and its up to her to get the largest wage for the least amount of toil...."(n70) The woman's conflict "between her class and the boss class"(n71) was also to be carried over into the personal sphere: "so must she fight for the right to own & control her own body, for the ownership of her own body to do with it as she desires--& its no ones business what those desires may be."(n72)
The call for women to reclaim control over their bodies was one which Sanger had sounded over a year earlier in The Woman Rebel, where she argued, "A woman's body belongs to herself alone. It is her body. It does not belong to the Church. It does not belong to the United States of America or to any other Government on the face of the earth."(n73) This argument served as the premise for Sanger's contention that "enforced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman's right to life and liberty."(n74) Sanger elaborated on this same contention in her Fabian Hall speech(n75) including four themes that would find a place in her 1916 United States lecture tour speeches: "the wages of the average man are scarcely sufficient to keep more than one child as it is;"(n76) "the far reaching Effect of abortions;"(n77) "the terrible loss of infant mortality among the working people;"(n78) and "it is 9 out of ten girls living the life of the underworld who come from parents who had large families & whose fathers belonged to the unskilled & unorganized laborers."(n79)

As she moved to conclude her remarks, Sanger attacked "better baby funds, Little Mother leagues, Milk Stations for babies,"(n80) and "child nurseries for the children while Mother slaves in factories"(n81) as the products of "sentimental minds"(n82) which chose to focus on "an alleviation of present day misery & ignorance Rather than go to the root of the question...."(n83) Sanger argued that, in contrast, her "agitation in the Woman Rebel" produced birth control leagues "reaching from coast to coast" and that those leagues "promise an agitation among the workers on this subject which should have marked results in the next four or five years."(n84)

Sanger's simplistic harangues about the relationships among such complex variables as economic conditions and infant mortality, abortion, and maternal, as well as family health indicate that she was unaware that the Fabian Society had appointed a subcommittee in May, 1905, "to consider birth-rate and infantile mortality statistics."(n85) The subcommittee's comprehensive report, issued in the Fabian Tract series as Number 131, The Decline in the Birth Rate, was a quantitatively based, detailed analysis of national census and questionnaire data. This document focused on the relationships among economic conditions, family structure, voluntary restriction of conception, infant mortality, and women's roles and prospects. The results of the study alarmed the subcommittee since the data indicated that "volitional regulation of the marriage state is demonstrably at work in many different parts of Great Britain, among all social grades except probably the very poorest"(n86) and that "the principal, if not the sole, cause of the present continuous decline in the birth-rate in Great Britain is the deliberate regulation of the marriage state . . . either with the object of family limitation, or merely with that of regulating the intervals between births...."(n87)

The primary conclusion of the report was that "in order that the population may be recruited from the self-controlled and foreseeing members of each class rather than of those who are reckless and improvident, we must alter the balance of considerations in favor of the child-producing family."(n88) The report then warned, "the question is whether we shall be able to turn round with sufficient sharpness and in time."(n89) Among the changes it urged were "unlimited provision of medical attendance on the child-bearing mother and her children,"(n90) "the municipal supply of milk to all infants,"(n91) "feeding of all children at school,"(n92) "maintenance scholarships for secondary, technical, and university education,"(n93) and the rapid development of a number of other policies that would insure that "the production of healthy, moral and intelligent citizens is revered as a social service and made the subject of deliberate praise and encouragement on the part of the government."(n94)

The final lines of the report were ominous: "To the present writer it seems that only by some such `sharp turn' in our way of dealing with these problems can we avoid degeneration of type--that is, race deterioration, if not race suicide."(n95) Sanger's insensitivity to such fears, especially in light of the mounting war casualties being suffered by the British, demonstrates her ignorance of her audience's background, situation and outlook. Furthermore, the report's focus on eugenics cast the situation in terms that would be reinvigorated a decade later in the United States by Theodore Roosevelt.(n96) As was noted earlier in this essay, Roosevelt's rhetoric against birth control would plague Sanger during her 1916 lecture tour. In contrast to her careless performance at Fabian Hall, Sanger's speeches in 1916 systematically attacked arguments that characterized her position as leading to "race suicide":

Am I to be persecuted and classed as immoral because I advocate small families for the working women while Mr. Roosevelt can go up and down the length of the land shouting and urging this class of women to have large families and is neither arrested nor molested but considered by all society as highly moral? But I ask you which is the more moral, to urge a working woman to have only those children she desires and can support or to delude her into bearing cannon fodder for munitions makers and professional jingoes? Let us ask ourselves which is America's definition of morality.(n97)

Sanger ended her speech at Fabian Hall by bolstering the worth of the propaganda that was being disseminated in the United States by the birth control leagues:
The propaganda is not a one sided NeoMalthuseian doctrine it is one rounded out with the workers Economic Moral & psychological attitude.

It is full of vitality & intense with indignation anger & contempt L.]
The object is to inject into the working woman a class independence which says to the Masters produce your own slaves--keep your religion your ethics & your morality for your selves--I'll have none of it & we refuse to be longer enslaved by it for we are creating our own & are building up a New Society through the process of which we are creating our own morality and individuality.(n98)