producing the multitudes who will bring about the _next_ tragedy of
civilization.

While unknowingly laying the foundations of tyrannies and providing
the human tinder for racial conflagrations, woman was also unknowingly
creating slums, filling asylums with insane, and institutions with
other defectives. She was replenishing the ranks of the prostitutes,
furnishing grist for the criminal courts and inmates for prisons. Had
she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste
and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively.

Woman's passivity under the burden of her disastrous task was almost
altogether that of ignorant resignation. She knew virtually nothing
about her reproductive nature and less about the consequences of her
excessive child-bearing. It is true that, obeying the inner urge of
their natures, _some_ women revolted. They went even to the extreme of
infanticide and abortion. Usually their revolts were not general
enough. They fought as individuals, not as a mass. In the mass they
sank back into blind and hopeless subjection. They went on breeding
with staggering rapidity those numberless, undesired children who
become the clogs and the destroyers of civilizations.

To-day, however, woman is rising in fundamental revolt. Even her
efforts at mere reform are, as we shall see later, steps in that
direction. Underneath each of them is the feminine urge to complete
freedom. Millions of women are asserting their right to voluntary
motherhood. They are determined to decide for themselves whether they
shall become mothers, under what conditions and when. This is the
fundamental revolt referred to. It is for woman the key to the temple
of liberty.