Daily Inspiration Quote by Havelock Ellis

Ellis writes like a man trying to normalize a social earthquake without sounding like he’s cheering. “Effecting” does double duty here: it means both “bringing about” and “having an effect on,” a careful Victorian-era hedge that lets him describe birth control as an active force while preserving the clinician’s pose of neutrality. The phrasing “promising to effect” adds a futurist charge. He’s not merely cataloging a new practice; he’s arguing that contraception is a technology of social re-engineering whose consequences are only beginning to show.

The intent is reformist, but strategically restrained. Ellis, a leading early sexologist, worked in an era when public discussion of contraception was policed by obscenity laws and moral panic. So he frames birth control not as libertinism or “vice,” but as a set of “functions” in “social life” - the language of systems, public health, demography, and policy. That abstraction is the point: it smuggles a controversial subject into respectable conversation by swapping scandal for sociology.

The subtext is sharper than the sentence sounds. If birth control affects “many functions,” it touches marriage and sexual autonomy, the spacing and size of families, women’s bargaining power, poverty and inheritance, even the state’s interest in population growth. Ellis is hinting that sexuality is no longer just personal conduct; it’s an administrative and ethical problem modern societies can’t ignore. The promise he names is also a warning: once reproduction becomes optional, every institution built around inevitability has to renegotiate its rules.