Malthusian League
맬서스 연맹
The British birth-control organisation founded during the Bradlaugh–Besant trial of 1877 and active until 1927. Holding the Malthusian view that over-population was the chief cause of working-class poverty, it called for the abolition of penalties for promoting contraception and for education in it. Hostile to socialism, it opened a birth-control clinic in London in 1921 with Norman Haire as medical officer.
In depth
The Malthusian League was founded in July 1877, during the trial of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant for publishing Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy, as a permanent body to campaign for the abolition of penalties for promoting birth control and for public education in contraception. Its first president was Charles Robert Drysdale, with Besant as secretary. Secular, utilitarian, individualistic and “above all malthusian”, it held over-population to be the chief cause of working-class poverty.
At first the Malthusian League confined itself largely to an educative role, stressing Malthus’s economic arguments rather than practical contraceptive information, and it grew more socially and economically conservative as the century wore on. Believing an excess of births to be the sole cause of poverty, it opposed socialism and called strikes and labour reforms “useless”. Its members were mostly middle class, though some were socialists, and it overlapped with the women’s rights movement; over time it veered towards eugenics.
Planning a birth-control clinic from 1917, the Malthusian League opened one on 9 November 1921 in Walworth, London, with Norman Haire as honorary medical officer. Marie Stopes had opened her clinic nine months earlier, but the League stressed that theirs was the first English clinic to give birth-control instruction under medical supervision. The League was dissolved in 1927.