Eugenic feminism was a current of the women's suffrage movement which overlapped with [[eugenics]].[1] Originally coined by the Lebanese-British physician and vocal eugenicist Caleb Saleeby,[2][3][4] the term has since been applied to summarize views held by prominent feminists of Great Britain and the United States. Some early suffragettes in Canada, especially a group known as The Famous Five, also pushed for various eugenic policies.
Eugenic feminists argued that if women were provided with more rights and equality, the deteriorating characteristics of a given race could be averted.
When Francis Galton originally formulated eugenics, he saw women functioning as a mere conduit to pass desirable traits from father to son. Later eugenicists saw women in a more active role, placing an increasing emphasis on women as “mothers of the race”. In particular new research in the science of heredity and the studies of procreation, child rearing and human reproduction led to changes in eugenic thought, which began to recognize the importance of women in those parts of the human life cycle. This change in emphasis led eventually to eugenicist Caleb Saleeby coining the term eugenic feminism in his book Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles (1911).[2][3] Saleeby wrote,
The mark of the following pages is that they assume the principle of what we may call Eugenic Feminism, and that they endeavour to formulate its working-out. It is my business to acquaint myself with the literature of both eugenics and feminism, and I know that hitherto the eugenists have inclined to oppose the claims of feminism [...]
Devereux characterizes Saleeby's coining of eugenic feminism as "at least partly a deceptive rhetorical strategy" whose goal was to "draw middle-class women's rights activists back to home and duty".[5]
In the 1930s eugenic feminism began to decline as eugenic feminists began to fall out with mainstream eugenicists, and had largely failed to sway the public opinion.[6][7]
In her biography of Marie Stopes, June Rose claimed "Marie was an elitist, an idealist, interested in creating a society in which only the best and beautiful should survive,"[8][9] a view echoed by Richard A. Soloway in the 1996 Galton Lecture: "If Stopes's general interest in birth control was a logical consequence of her romantic preoccupation with compatible sexuality within blissful marriage, her particular efforts to provide birth control for the poor had far more to do with her eugenic concerns about the impending 'racial darkness' that the adoption of contraception promised to illuminate."[10]
Regarding threats of dysgenics, she spoke of "that intolerable stream of misery which ever overflows its banks."[11]
Stopes's enthusiasm for eugenics and race improvement was in line with many intellectuals and public figures of the time: for example Havelock Ellis, Cyril Burt and George Bernard Shaw. Eugenic sympathies were drawn from the left and the right of politics and included Labour politicians, such as Ellen Wilkinson.[12] As a child Stopes had met Francis Galton, one of the founders of modern eugenics, through her father. She joined the Eugenics Education Society in 1912[13] and became a life fellow in 1921.[14] Clare Debenham[15] in her 2018 biography of Stopes argues in Chapter Nine that she was a maverick eugenicist, who was shunned by the inner circle of the Eugenic Society. In 1934, she reflected: "I am a Life Fellow and would have much more interest in the Eugenics Society if I had not been cold shouldered".[16]
The objects of the Society For Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress expressed the eugenic aims of the Mothers' Clinic,[17] summarised in Tenet 16:
"In short, we are profoundly and fundamentally a pro-baby organisation, in favour of producing the largest possible number of healthy, happy children without detriment to the mother, and with the minimum wastage of infants by premature deaths. In this connection our motto has been 'Babies in the right place,' and it is just as much the aim of Constructive Birth Control to secure conception to those married people who are healthy, childless, and desire children, as it is to furnish security from conception to those who are racially diseased, already overburdened with children, or in any specific way unfitted for parenthood."[18]
"Racially diseased" included conditions such as infectious diseases (like tuberculosis), or caused by environmental factors (such as poor living conditions and malnutrition).
In Chapter XX of her 1920 book Radiant Motherhood Stopes discussed race and said that the "one central reform" was: "The power of the mother, consciously exerted in the voluntary procreation and joyous bearing of her children, is the greatest power in the world".[21] She added that two "main dangers" stood in the way. The first of these was ignorance and the second was the "inborn incapacity which lies in the vast and ever increasing stock of degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced who are now in our midst and who devastate social customs. These populate most rapidly and tend proportionately to increase and these are like the parasite upon the healthy tree sapping its vitality."[22] Stopes then stated that "a few quite simple acts of Parliament" could deal with "this prolific depravity" through sterilisation by x-rays and assured the reader that "when Bills are passed to ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased, and to provide for the education of the child-bearing woman so that she spaces her children healthily, our race will rapidly quell the stream of the depraved, hopeless and wretched lives which are at present increasing in proportion in our midst".[23]
Stopes promoted her eugenic ideas to politicians. In 1920 she sent a copy of her book, Radiant Motherhood—arguably the most explicitly eugenic of her books—to the Prime Minister's secretary (and mistress), Frances Stevenson, and urged her to get David Lloyd George to read them.[24] In November 1922, just before the general election, she sent a questionnaire to parliamentary candidates asking that they sign a declaration that: "I agree that the present position of breeding chiefly from the C3 population and burdening and discouraging the A1 is nationally deplorable, and if I am elected to Parliament I will press the Ministry of Health to give such scientific information through the Ante-natal Clinics, Welfare Centres and other institutions in its control as will curtail the C3 and increase the A1". She received 150 replies.[25]
In July 1931 the Women's Co-operative Guild at their conference passed a resolution advocating compulsory sterilisation for the mentally or physically unfit.[26]
A 1933 letter from Stopes to a friend revealed disillusion with eugenics: "I do not think I want to write a book about Eugenics. The word has been so tarnished by some people that they are not going to get my name tacked onto it".[27] Despite this, she attended the International Congress for Population Science in Berlin in 1935.[28] After attending this conference she came under attack by some of her former supporters such a Guy Aldred and Havelock Ellis[29] and, on her death in 1958, she bequeathed her clinics to the Eugenics Society.[30]
In 1934, an interview published in the Australian Women's Weekly disclosed her views on mixed-race marriages: she advised correspondents against them and believed that all half-castes should be sterilized at birth... "thus painlessly and in no way interfering with the individual's life, the unhappy fate of he who is neither black nor white is prevented from being passed on to yet unborn babes."[31]
In August 1939 she sent a copy of her Love Song for Young Lovers to Adolf Hitler because "Love is the greatest thing in the world". She wanted her poems to be distributed through the German birth control clinics. However, according to Rose, any sympathy she may have had with Hitler was dissipated when he closed those clinics.[25] On 12 July 1940 she wrote to Winston Churchill to offer a slogan, "Fight the Battle of Britain in Berlin's Air".[25]
Victoria Woodhull was a prominent advocate of eugenics. Woodhull also had a husband that was abusive, alcoholic, and disloyal, which she thought that might have contributed to the mental disability of her son, Byron.[7] With her newly sparked interest in eugenics, Woodhull promoted her views by giving addresses and publishing various books. A significant address was made in September 1871 and was titled Children: Their Rights and Privileges in which she claimed that “a perfect humanity must come of perfect children.”[34]
Moreover, she mentioned the importance of having “the best seed” to be able to have children that can grow into functional adults, the nurturing of parents to children, and the wickedness of abortion. With the effort of promoting eugenics by Woodhull, a portion of feminists also started to advocate for eugenics as well. These women thought that there were too many children and supported families that had fewer. In an 1876 speech in New Jersey, Woodhull placed a great importance on eugenics, more than the importance of obtaining the rights for women to vote, mentioning that women's suffrage was unimportant compared to creating a more superior human race.[34]
Woodhull's version of eugenics, which held that adherence to then-prevalent sexual norms led to degenerate offspring, was sharply divergent from the mainstream eugenics of the 1890s. Her views shifted over time, never fully aligning with the eugenicist mainstream, particularly on birth control.[6]
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 3 July 1860
As a leading feminist author of her time, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published various feminist literary works, including poems, articles on eugenics for The Forerunner, and novels such as: Women and Economics, Herland, With Her in Ourland and His Religion and Hers.[7][35][36] In Herland, Gilman champions eugenic feminism by imagining an all-female utopian society made up of women who somehow were able to reproduce asexually. They all descended from a single mother, therefore miscegenation was not a problem in her imagined society, neither, it seems, was inheriting undesirable genes, as those who were deemed unfit to reproduce were discouraged from doing so.[35] Gilman's arguments essentially promoted feminism by “representing eugenic ideology as the source” of help.[36] She advocated equal sexual rights for men and women and advocated legalizing birth control for women.[7]
Decline
In the 1940s, eugenic feminism began to decline. There were irreconcilable differences between feminism and eugenics that could not accommodate each other. Feminists abandoned their eugenic ideas and opinions when it became harder to gather support and more difficult to combine the two movements. Additionally, support for the eugenics movement as a whole began to wane as the public compared American sterilization practices to the sterilization laws of Nazi Germany which were deemed "totalitarian."[7]
Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have altered various human gene frequencies by inhibiting the fertility of people and groups they considered inferior, or promoting that of those considered superior.
Margaret Higgins Sanger, also known as Margaret Sanger Slee, was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. She popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Victoria Claflin Woodhull, later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because she was younger than the constitutionally mandated age of 35.
Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant paleontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual Married Love (1918) was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse. Stopes publicly opposed abortion, arguing that the prevention of conception was all that was needed, though her actions in private were at odds with her public pronouncements.
Henry Havelock Ellis was an English-French physician, eugenicist, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He co-wrote the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as on transgender psychology. He developed the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis.
In 1924, the Virginia General Assembly enacted the Racial Integrity Act. The act reinforced racial segregation by prohibiting interracial marriage and classifying as "white" a person "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian". The act, an outgrowth of eugenicist and scientific racist propaganda, was pushed by Walter Plecker, a white supremacist and eugenicist who held the post of registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics.
The Adelphi Genetics Forum is a non-profit learned society based in the United Kingdom. Its aims are "to promote the public understanding of human heredity and to facilitate informed debate about the ethical issues raised by advances in reproductive technology."
Eugenics has influenced political, public health and social movements in Japan since the late 19th and early 20th century. Originally brought to Japan through the United States, through Mendelian inheritance by way of German influences, and French Lamarckian eugenic written studies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eugenics as a science was hotly debated at the beginning of the 20th, in Jinsei-Der Mensch, the first eugenics journal in the Empire. As the Japanese sought to close ranks with the West, this practice was adopted wholesale, along with colonialism and its justifications.
Three International Eugenics Congresses took place between 1912 and 1932 and were the global venue for scientists, politicians, and social leaders to plan and discuss the application of programs to improve human heredity in the early twentieth century.
The social purity movement was a late 19th-century social movement that sought to abolish prostitution and other sexual activities that were considered immoral according to Christian morality. The movement was active in English-speaking nations from the late 1860s to about 1910, exerting an important influence on the contemporaneous feminist, eugenics, and birth control movements.
Caleb Williams Saleeby FRSE was an English physician, writer, and journalist known for his support of eugenics. During World War I, he was an adviser to the Minister of Food and advocated the establishment of a Ministry of Health.
Compulsory sterilization in Canada is an ongoing practice that has a documented history in the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia.
Eugenics, the set of beliefs and practices which aims at improving the genetic quality of the human population, played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States from the late 19th century into the mid-20th century. The cause became increasingly promoted by intellectuals of the Progressive Era.
Geza von Hoffmann (1885–1921) was a prominent Austrian-Hungarian eugenicist and writer. He lived for a time in California as the Austrian Vice-Consulate where he observed and wrote on eugenics practices in the United States.
The history of eugenics is the study of development and advocacy of ideas related to eugenics around the world. Early eugenic ideas were discussed in Ancient Greece and Rome. The height of the modern eugenics movement came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Halliday Gibson Sutherland (1882–1960) was a Scottish medical doctor, writer, opponent of eugenics and the producer of Britain's first public health education cinema film in 1911.
Institutions for Defective Delinquents (IDDs) were created in the United States as a result of the eugenic criminology movement. The practices in these IDDs contain many traces of the eugenics that were first proposed by Sir Francis Galton in the late 1800s. Galton believed that "our understanding of the laws of heredity [could be used] to improve the stock of humankind." Galton eventually expanded on these ideas to suggest that individuals deemed inferior, those in prisons or asylums and those with hereditary diseases, would be discouraged from having children.
Sybil Neville-Rolfe OBE was a social hygienist and founder of the Eugenics Society, and a leading figure in the National Council for Combating Venereal Diseases. She has been described as a feminist and a eugenicist.
Following the Mexican Revolution, the eugenics movement gained prominence in Mexico. Seeking to change the genetic make-up of the country's population, proponents of eugenics in Mexico focused primarily on rebuilding the population, creating healthy citizens, and ameliorating the effects of perceived social ills such as alcoholism, prostitution, and venereal diseases. Mexican eugenics, at its height in the 1930s, influenced the state's health, education, and welfare policies.
Sterilization of Latinas has been practiced in the United States on women of different Latin American identities, including those from Puerto Rico and Mexico. There is a significant history of such sterilization practices being conducted involuntarily, in a coerced or forced manner, as well as in more subtle forms such as that of constrained choice. Forced sterilization was permissible by multiple states throughout various periods in the 20th century. Issues of state sterilization have persisted as recently as September 2020. Some sources credit the practice to theories of racial eugenics.
References
1 2 Rosario, Esther (2013-09-13). "Feminism". The Eugenics Archives. Archived from the original on 2019-09-09. Retrieved 27 October 2018.
1 2 Saleeby, Caleb Williams (1911). "First Principles". Woman and Womanhood A Search for Principles. New York: J. J. Little & Ives Co. MITCHELL KENNERLEY. p.7. The mark of the following pages is that they assume the principle of what we may call Eugenic Feminism
↑ Gibbons, Sheila Rae. "Women's suffrage". The Eugenics Archives. Retrieved 31 October 2018. Dr. Caleb Saleeby, an obstetrician and active member of the British Eugenics Education Society, opposed his contemporaries – such as Sir Francis Galton – who took strong anti-feminist stances in their eugenic philosophies. Perceiving the feminist movement as potentially "ruinous to the race" if it continued to ignore the eugenics movement, he coined the term "eugenic feminism" in his 1911 text Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
1 2 Ziegler, Mary (2008). "Eugenic Feminism: Mental Hygiene, the Women's Movement, and the Campaign for Eugenic Legal Reform, 1900-1935". Harvard Journal of Law and Gender. 31: 211. SSRN1646393. Several different visions of eugenic feminism were articulated between 1890 and 1930, but each found commonality in the argument that the eugenic decline of the race could be prevented only if women were granted greater political, social, sexual, and economic equality. This argument correlated gender equality with racial improvement: eugenic science and law had to guarantee some form of substantive gender equality in order to improve the race. Thus, in the years between 1915 and 1935, eugenic feminism existed distinct from, and in increasing tension with, mainstream eugenic science and policy. Ultimately, leading eugenic feminists could neither change the minds of a majority of the eugenic coalition nor resolve the contradictions inherent in their own eugenic theories. While they often argued that their reforms should be supported primarily as means to achieve a eugenic end, each leader held on to the very kinds of rights and equality-based arguments that mainstream eugenicists rejected. This contradiction contributed significantly to the decline and disappearance of eugenic feminism in the early and mid-1930s.
↑ "Feminism". The Eugenics Archives. Archived from the original on 9 September 2019. Retrieved 31 October 2018. All of the Famous Five were also involved in the race hygiene movement and supported the passage of the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta
1 2 Woodhull, Victoria; Perry, Michael W. (2005). Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and Writings of Victoria Woodhull. Inkling Books. p.331. ISBN978-1587420429.
1 2 Nadkarni, Asha (Spring 2006). "Eugenic Feminism: Asian Reproduction in the U.S. National Imagery". Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 39 (2): 221–226. doi:10.1215/ddnov.039020221. JSTOR40267654.
1 2 Seitler, Dana (March 2003). "Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Regeneration Narratives". American Quarterly. 55 (1): 63–66. doi:10.1353/aq.2003.0001. JSTOR30041957. S2CID143831741.
Further reading
Allen, Ann Taylor (2000). "Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900-1940: A Comparative Perspective". German Studies Review. 23 (3): 477–505. doi:10.2307/1432830. JSTOR1432830.
Devereux, Cecily. "Growing a Race: Nellie L. McClung and the Fiction of Eugenic Feminism." Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, 2005.
Erika Dyck, “Sterilization and Birth Control in the Shadow of Eugenics: Married, Middle-Class Women in Alberta, 1930-1960s”, CBMH/BCHM 31, No. 1, 2014
Moss, Erin L.; Stam, Henderikus J.; Kattevilder, Diane (2013). "Sterilization: Eugenics and the Women's Movement in 20th Century Alberta". Canadian Psychology. 54 (2): 105–14. doi:10.1037/a0032644.
Soloway, Richard A (1995). "The 'Perfect Contraceptive': Eugenics and Birth Control Research in Britain and America in the Interwar Years". Journal of Contemporary History. 30 (4): 637–664. doi:10.1177/002200949503000404. S2CID159808391.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
