A light had been kindled; so many invitations to address meetings in various cities and towns were sent me that I was not able to accept them all but agreed to as many as I could. It was no longer to be only a free speech movement, and I wanted also if possible to present this new idea of clinics to the country. If I could start them, other organizations and even hospitals might do the same. I had a vision of a “chain”—thousands of them in every center of America, staffed with specialists putting the subject on a modern scientific basis through research.
Many states in the West had already granted woman suffrage. Having achieved this type of freedom, I was sure they would receive clinics more readily, especially California which had no law against birth control. The same thing would follow in the East. As I told the _Tribune_, “I have the word of four prominent physicians that they will support me in the work.... There will be nurses in attendance at the clinic, and doctors who will instruct women in the things they need to know. All married women or women about to be married will be assisted free and without question.”
A splendid promise—but difficult to fulfill, as events were to prove.
“_Speak clearly if you speak at all. Carve every word before you let it fall._” OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Once Amos Pinchot asked me how long it had taken me to prepare that first lecture I delivered on my three months’ trip across the country in 1916.
I was thinking of all the time that had passed during which experiences, tragic and stirring, had come to me and were embodied therein.
So much depended on this speech; the women of leisure must be made to listen, the women of wealth to give, the women of influence to protest. Before starting April 1st, I tried to put myself in their places and to see how their interests and imaginations could most effectively be excited, how the pictures which had so unceasingly beset me could best be brought to their minds. I felt certain that if I could do this, they would do the rest.
But the anxiety that went into the composition of the speech was as nothing to the agonies with which I contemplated its utterance. My mother used to say a decent woman only had her name in the papers three times during her life—when she was born, when she married, and when she died. Although by nature I shrank from publicity, the kind of work I had undertaken did not allow me to shirk it—but I was frightened to death. Hoping that practice would give me greater confidence, I used to climb to the roof of the Lexington Avenue hotel where I was staying and recite, my voice going out over the house tops and echoing timidly among the chimney pots.