For a capitalist, high or at least growing birth rates are an essential for ‘economic expansion,’ whether it be to supply enough surplus workers to force into the fields and sewers; for enough unemployment to temper militancy and reduce wages for all; as well as creating ever-more consumers to buy useless commodities at the new Dollar Stores opening daily. With today’s return of the ‘Breed! Brigade’–the exaltation of women’s role as mother always a corresponding ideal of rising reaction–Mary E. Marcy, interestingly written under one of her male pseudonyms, mounts the barricades to battle the ‘Breed! Brigade’ of World War One’s reaction.

‘Fewer and Better Children’ by Mary E. Marcy (James Morton) from International Socialist Review. Vol. 15 No. 4. November, 1914.

ΟNE has only to walk down in the Lower East Side in New York, or down Halsted street in Chicago, or in the congested working districts in any large city to be filled with wonder that no organization has seriously undertaken the propaganda of Fewer and Better Children for America.

I am reminded of my friend, a painter, who married a lovely girl in the middle west and moved into a cozy cottage in the suburbs of a thriving city. Two years later he removed his wife and their year-old son to a flat “nearer the Loop.” The next time I met him, I found he had stepped down another rung on the ladder of comfort and was dwelling, with his wife, his son and his baby daughter, in a tiny flat close to the west side factory district.

And so it went. With the advent of each new baby my old friend moved his growing brood into smaller and dingier quarters, until when I last visited him, he and his wife and their seven children were existing in three small rooms, half of a six-room flat, which they shared with an equally impecunious member of the Building Trades, the demands of whose offspring had long since exceeded the elasticity of his weekly wage.

Here are two glaring examples of the crime of having two many children. In both instances the weekly wage of the fathers was sufficient to bring up a family of one or two children in a modicum of comfort. The parents would have been able to send them to school, to live in tolerably healthful surroundings, to provide them with the simple necessities and comforts of life. In both cases the first two children born to these working class parents were normal and healthy. The third and fourth babies were born before they had recovered from the strain of the first two.

The fathers of these families were slightly in debt to doctors and nurses, were anxious and worn with helping to care for the first children. The mothers were weak and anemic from nursing and child-bearing. The prospect of Baby Number Three was a most unwelcome one from the financial, hygienic and parental point of view. Instead of moving to a home with better air, and sunshine, and more room, these two trade workers were compelled to rent smaller, less healthful and sanitary quarters. They were able to pay less rent as their families grew. They were forced to buy cheaper food, poorer clothing. Grim necessity prevented the purchase of the special infant’s food the babies required. None of the babies that were born into these two working class families thereafter were either normal or healthy. All were below normal in size, weight and powers of resistance to disease. Three died. After the birth of her third baby, the wife of my friend never actually recovered to normal health and was never able to afford the medical care she needed for herself and her children.

Actual want forced the parents in both families to take their eldest children from school and start them to work before they were twelve or thirteen years of age. Love, hope and all the things that go to make “home life” a beautiful thing were lost in the stern fight against pain and privation. Making-ends-meet sapped the last ounce of energy from fathers and mothers. Family courtesies and amenities require a leisure, a poise and peace that nobody possessed or could possess in a year-long effort to make one dollar do the work of two.

One man took to drink; one of the mothers died at the age of thirty-six in child-birth. All of the children are entering the battle of life with handicaps they will never be able to overcome in the struggle for existence.

It seems to me that nobody can deny that the revolutionary labor movement undoubtedly lost three or four confessed rebels through the short-sightedness and ignorance of these young couples.

We know, positively, that one young mother was lost at an early age in giving birth to her seventh child; that six children were thereby left without a mother’s care; that the father endeavored to pay for their support in a public institution but finally succumbed to despair through lack of steady employment, and disappeared.

Here was one family disrupted, broken up beyond all hope of mending through the old evil of Poverty. But even with the handicap of a seasonal occupation and intermittent idleness, it might still have maintained its integrity, have raised one or two children to become useful, militant soldiers in the revolution, if it had not been crushed beneath the weight of rearing too many children.

Thousands of volumes have been written setting forth the rights of the children. We think it is high time somebody began to speak of the rights of the parents. Men and women are human beings too. Somebody has suffered to bring them into the world. Some one has struggled to feed and clothe and raise them to man and womanhood. There is ample work for each and every working-man and woman to do to support themselves and to continue the work of Socialism. We do not think it a work of social expediency or of social efficiency to produce children in large numbers when we have no assurance of what their future might be.

Is it not time that we decided to cherish the revolutionary material we have ready to hand today in men and women rather than to sacrifice it to the production of uncertain material in the future?

Let us have fewer children, healthful children, children who shall at least start in life free from disease and with a gambling chance to grow up into strong and intelligent men and women.

Society in America guarantees absolutely nothing whatsoever to the children of the working class. To the children of the rich it is true we make iron-clad guarantee. We point with pride (?) to the army and navy, the police, the laws and the courts by way of assuring rich men and women that their property shall be protected and preserved for the benefit of their children. The children of the parents who work are promised neither food, clothing nor shelter. They are not even promised jobs and a chance to earn a living. Their parents are not even guaranteed steady work to enable them to earn money for food, for clothing and for homes.

Almost every social institution aids in the guarantee of property rights to the rich. Nothing is offered to would-be parents in the working class.

And what becomes of the children of those who possess no property and are therefore forced to labor in order to live? A large percentage of them die in infancy through lack of hygienic surroundings, through lack of proper nourishment, fresh air and healthful homes, because of lack of proper care or medical attention. Many struggle downward to man and womanhood, diseased, anemic, crippled, uneducated because of poverty; And what do these children become? Many thousands in America are annually forced into crime through lack of employment. Still others are forced into the army, navy or into the police force. Hundreds of thousands of girls are forced into the ranks of prostitution every year. From whence come the recruits for the underworld? Do we find the wayward sons of the Astors or the Goulds or the Vanderbilts climbing porches or picking pockets to get enough money to buy food? Do we find them selling their bodies on the streets or becoming food for cannon in the army? Everybody knows that we do not. They don’t have to climb porches for money, or join the army in order to secure food. The law permits them to withhold a portion of the value which people who work for them produce; the police and the army stand ready to help defeat the children of the working class who dare to demand higher wages, a larger portion of the wealth they have created.

The press, the pulpit, the laws, the army and navy, the courts and the colleges stand as a unit in maintaining the privileges of the owning class, for the children of the property owners. They stand as a protecting barricade about the wealth of the rich, against the appeals and claims of the toilers of the earth.

What does the United States government offer to the young married people who are bringing children into the world? Evidently it believes that the bearing and rearing of children are a social blessing for it has littered the statutes with laws declaring it to be illegal for a man or a woman to impart knowledge that shall teach parents how to avoid having children.

It seeks to make unrestricted childbearing a necessity but it offers as a reward only the heaviest possible handicap to the poor who are unable to escape to this necessity. It commands you multiply and yet it drives the men and women who are out of work from one city to another in a mad desire to evade the burden of their support.

“More children!” it cries while it permits whole families to perish from sheer wanton starvation. “More children!” it urges when hundreds of thousands of men and women face the coming of the winter nights without a place to sleep.

Any reputable physician could tell you how to avoid having children. Nearly all physicians, of any standing among the medical profession, do so advise their rich clients. This advice is ready to hand for those who have the money to purchase it. Society has taken care to provide a way for the rich to avoid the pain and trouble of child-bearing. Yet it is the rich alone who are in a position today to surround their children with healthful surroundings. It is the rich only who can protect the human young against all the diseases and disasters that are the heritage of the children of the poor.

It is time we refused to feed, clothe, house the world and populate it too. It is time we refused to bear the impossible handicap of more children than we can feed. It is about time we took stock of ourselves and declined to produce diseased children. In other words, it would be a mighty good idea for us all to take a day off and do a little thinking.

Let us set our faces against this utterly planless system of forcing helpless babies into an unfriendly world, and burdens upon the backs of the overburdened working class. Now is the time to force the light of publicity upon this question. It must be discussed. We must have healthy parents, healthy babies and healthful surroundings for all.

Discussion and publicity and the interest of the working class is all we need. It is up to you and me to bring these questions to their attention.

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v15n05-nov-1914-ISR-riaz-ocr.pdf