Alice Dunbar-Nelson Quotes
The race is here faced with a startling fact. Our birth rate is declining; our infant mortality is increasing; our normal rate of increase must necessarily be slowing up; our educated and intelligent classes are refusing to have children; our women are going into the kind of work that taxes both physical and mental capacities, which of itself, limits fecundity. While white women are beginning to work more away from home, at present, even with the rush of all women into the wage earner's class, in New York City alone, seven times as many colored as white women work away from home.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson, 1875-1935, Author, Activist & Educator, Woman's Most Serious Problem
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Birth control was not commonly available and knowledge about it was also sparce. Having many children was the “will of God” in common parlance.
Many people erroneously attribute this quotation to Margaret Sanger, who had observed that the upper class women generally knew how to practice birth control and could obtain the devices that were available at the time while the poor and uneducated knew very little and not only did not have the money to obtain birth control devices, but the laws made it illegal so that no one dared to promote it. Du Bois was in many ways, a Black elitist and this quotation reflects that.
Mrs. Roosevelt made issues national by the use of her daily column which was a type of blog with newspapers. Here she focused on a major health problem. At the time, Mrs. Roosevelt saw this as a women’s issue which of course it was. Government spent large sums of money to minimize or prevent death of men in war, but almost nothing on the problem of women’s death in childbirth despite the fact that many more women were killed than men. Unfortunately, while not to the same degree or proportion, the problem is still with us. With our wonderful modern medicine, we have increased the lifespan of most Americans markedly, but there are still many women who receive no prenatal care or counseling with the negative consequence.
Alice Dunbar Nelson was an American poet, journalist, and political activist. Among the first generation born free in the South after the Civil War, she was one of the prominent African Americans involved in the artistic flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance. Her first husband was the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. After his death, she then married physician Henry A. Callis; and, lastly, was married to Robert J. Nelson, a poet and civil rights activist. She achieved prominence as a poet, author of short stories and dramas, newspaper columnist, activist for women's rights, and editor of two anthologies.
