Neither threat of
hell nor the infliction of physical punishment has availed. Women have
deceived and dared, resisted and defied the power of church and state.
Quietly, desperately, consciously, they have marched to the gates of
death to gain the liberty which the feminine spirit has desired.
In savage life as well as in barbarism and civilization has woman's
instinctive urge to freedom and a wider development asserted itself in
an effort, successful or otherwise, to curtail her family.
"The custom of infanticide prevails or has prevailed," says Westermark
in his monumental work, _The Origin and Development of the Moral
Idea_, "not only in the savage world but among the semi-civilized and
civilized races."
With the savage mother, family limitation ran largely to infanticide,
although that practice was frequently accompanied by abortion as a
tribal means. As McLennan says in his "Studies in Ancient History,"
infanticide was formerly very common among the savages of New Zealand,
and "it was generally perpetrated by the mother." He notes much the
same state of affairs among the primitive Australians, except that
abortion was _also_ frequently employed. In numerous North American
Indian tribes, he says, infanticide and abortion were not uncommon,
and the Indians of Central America were found by him "to have gone to
extremes in the use of abortives.
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