Woman’s Enslavement As Wife & Mother – H.M.L., 4/1886

Republished from our predecessor publication Lucifer the Light Bearer

My Dear Mrs. Wilmans: I feel that you are the true friend of women, and so I venture to write to you. I don’t know
that any good can come of it, but it seems as if I must do it just to save myself from insanity. I live on a farm, and
we are not able to keep a hired girl. I have five children, the oldest eight years of age, the youngest sixteen months.
There would have been one younger if it had not been for my own murderous act. I was so weak and miserable
and had to work so hard that I just implored my husband to keep me from having another. He is kind to me in the
main, but will make no sacrifice for me to keep me from bearing children. When I knew this last one would come
I turned wild. Oh! it seemed as if I would rather die a thousand times than go through that awful, awful torture again.
I believe my soul did desert me for a time. I left home; I scoured the country on foot and bareheaded for days. At
last I tried desperate remedies to kill the unborn child, and succeeded at the risk of my life. But I did not care for
my life; I did not care for the thought that my children would be motherless. I had just one desperate desire resting
on me like a pall. I could not see one ray of light or hope from under it. There was the eternal round of duties; no
rest for body or mind. There was the unending sickness that precedes childbirth, and the heavy dragging at back
and brain. Life was nothing but an acute consciousness of imposition and cruel wrong. I turned away from thoughts
of prayer with a mental curse upon God for making men the lustful creatures they are, and creating women as the
tortured receptacles of their lusts. I want to leave my husband. I am free now. I have killed that last child. I have no
more remorse than if I had crushed a worm. I hated my husband so while bearing it that I wanted to murder him.
Why I tell you, Mrs. Wilmans, though he is a good man, there has not been a day in five years that I would not
have felt it a glorious relief to have him brought home dead. He is a reckless horseback rider.

Whenever he goes off in the morning on some half-broke colt, my mind will run all day on the prospect of his being
brought home dead. And yet he is good, and so fine looking. He has never spoken a cross word to me. Oh! how
I could love him, and how proud of him I could be if he only protected me from the result of his lusts. I tell you
Mrs. Wilmans, I have thought deeply on the subject, while dragging about doing my work, that love is one thing
and lust another. The man that loves his wife as her heart demands, will protect her from his lusts, and not let
them poison her life and ruin her happiness. I have one little girl. When she was born, and they told me it was a
girl, I shrieked in terror and dreadful foreboding for her. I held her in my arms night after night perfectly sleepless,
praying for God to take her. I worshiped the little angel, and this was the best my love could ask for her. Now,
Mrs. Wilmans, I do not want you to hate me. I know I am dreadfully wicked, but I am on the verge of suicide or
insanity; for I am sure to be in the condition again from which I risked my life to get free, and I cannot stand it.
I know other women as bad as I am about this matter. They are good, religious women about everything else,
but their religion fails them here. I have talked with a number, and hardly one of them who would not gladly
be free from her awful position even if it was the angel of death that set her free. You heard of that woman
that killed her three little girls, but saved the boy. I lived in California then, and was present at her trial. She
was going to be confined soon, and oh! such a desperate, hunted-down look as the poor creature had. She
confessed to poisoning them, and her only plea was: “They was gals, Judge; don’t you understand? They
was gals.” Only the women in the court-room understood her defense, and it was heartrending to hear them
sob and shriek low, kind of under their breath. And the men sat as cold as stones, and judged her and
condemned her to death. But the law was saved the expense of strangling its wretched victim, for she
died two weeks later in giving birth to a human monster that was buried with her.

Oh, my God! Mrs. Wilmans, how long will we poor wives have to bear so much? Is there no redress for us? Do
you know any appliance that will prevent conception? I have heard of such things. If there is anything reliable
you will save my life by telling me of it. I’ve got one of your papers. I read it over and over like the Bible. It seemed
as if it revealed a pitying mother God who would take us from under the torture of the father God’s cruel law.
I know this is blasphemous, but I am desperate; I cannot help it. I will pray for forgiveness when my reprieve
comes. I cannot pray now.

Comments of Mrs. Wilmans (Woman’s World)

If this dreadful letter had been the first of its kind to reach me, I doubt whether I should have thought seriously of
publishing it. But listen while I state a tremendous fact. Nearly every day brings me such letters. As a rule they
are not so powerfully written, but they all mean the same thing; namely, race degradation through forced maternity.
Women are not permitted under the vile system of inequality that marks the position of the sexes to own their
own bodies; not permitted to say when and how often they are willing to bring a child into the world. Thus deprived
of all volition in the matter, motherhood from being felt by them to be the blessedest of all boons, has become
the curse and terror of the sex. Hence infanticide with its desperate results, and the threatened destruction of
the maternal instinct, the noblest and holiest impulse of woman. Marriage under the present reign of the male
element is not true marriage in any sense. It is the death of true marriage, and the curse of the race. It is the
riveting of the fetters of servitude upon the woman, and the compulsory introduction of thousands of unloved
and inferior children into the world. It is the slow but sure slaughter of all the higher and purer faculties and
institutions of women everywhere. It is the murderer of woman’s great spiritual nature, whose deadly influx
converts her into a murderer, and breathes the spirit of murder into the breath of her children. I believe there
ought to be a law making it a state prison offense for any man to bring his wife into the desperate condition of
this woman whose letter I publish—to actually make a murderer of her. Enforced motherhood should stand on
the criminal docket second only to the crime of taking life, and its punishment should be commensurate with
its hideousness. I have written a great deal of woman’s financial independence. I have said she would never
achieve political liberty until she earned enough money to command the respect which is denied to her in her
forced dependence upon man’s efforts.

But financial independence cannot possibly come to woman, except in isolated cases, where she is forced to
spend her whole vitality in the bearing or rearing of children. And I believe now that some appliance for the
prevention of conception, that is at the same time harmless and infallible, would do more for the emancipation
of women than anything in the world besides. There is a higher law that would deliver woman from “Under
the Curse,” but the race is not ripe for it. A few husbands and wives, who together look with disgust upon our
present irrational and animalized marriages, are ready to hear and profit by the spiritual truths on this mighty
subject, but they are very few indeed. In nearly every instance where I sought to inculcate them it has been
casting pearls before swine. In despair of doing the good I wish to do on this subject I only feel that I must wait
until, through much suffering by women universally, much rebellion against the suffering, and the consequent
perplexity and unhappiness of men, both sexes find themselves ready to discard the lust element of marriage
and listen to the doctrine of a pure and ennobling conjugal affection that shall rear only love children in such
numbers as may be desired, and that shall lift both husbands and wives above all sin and disease, and confer
the boon of unending health, happiness and potency. Let no one imagine that in the foregoing I have spoken a
word against true marriage, the union of one man and one woman on the basis of a mutual love. Such marriages
will be the salvation of the race. But, by as much as I revere the true marriage whose cement is love, by so much
do I despise that dreadful condition to which most marriages degenerate, in which all attraction of the nobler
sort ceases, and each party to the contract becomes to the other simply a selfish necessity for the convenience
of the animalized demands of the lower nature.