Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938 (review)

The central argument of this book is that "from 1890 to the 1930s nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, the family, and home were used to construct and legitimate political agendas and social policies concerning reproduction" (3). Although the United States did not pass laws or enact public policies to encourage childbearing in the early twentieth century, as did other Western nations, the author finds expressions of American pronatalism (that is, attitudes encouraging childbearing) in national campaigns for land reclamation, conservation, country life, and eugenics. She claims that the ideological and cultural roots of pronatalism can be located during the five decades covered by this book, in spite of the fact that the fertility rate for white women in the United States decreased from 3.87 births per woman in 1890 to 2.10 births per woman in 1940.¹ She chooses not to relate this data to her thesis: "I am not concerned with the demographic success of any of these pronatalist efforts, but with how nostalgic ideals were deployed in early twentieth-century pronatalism" (15).

After unleashing ideas about childbearing from actual reproductive practices, Lovett confines her analysis to the ideologies of five representative historical figures. She detects pronatalist tendencies in the social agendas of the Populist Mary Elizabeth Lease, who championed the ideal of the rural farm family; George Maxwell, who promoted irrigation of the arid west to encourage building homes on the land; economist and sociologist Edward A. Ross, who coined the term "race suicide" to describe the differential birth rates between native whites and other ethnic groups in America; Theodore Roosevelt, whose interest in the conservation and country-life movements was spurred in part by his concern about race suicide; and Florence Sherborn, a doctor who popularized eugenics via "Fitter Families" contests at state fairs. In the words and actions of these individuals, Lovett finds pronatalism linked with the scientific racism of positive eugenics (encouraging those of "good stock" to have several children) and with romantic notions of the agrarian family.

Presumably, all historians will be familiar with Roosevelt. The other figures might be known only to those working in certain sub-disciplines; scholars of Populism, for example, will be acquainted with Lease, while environmental historians will recognize Maxwell. Lovett unites these diverse contemporaries (born within sixteen years of one another, from 1853 to 1869) and, by extension, the different scholars who study them. She finds the common theme of pronatalism within their disparate visions of how best to shape American society. Thus, although some of her stories have been told before—the history of eugenics, for example, is well-trodden ground—she brings together different aspects of, and approaches to, the Populist, Progressive, and Great Depression eras in her search for what she calls "the deep roots" of the pronatalism that bloomed in the years following World War II (171).

This book touches on several different fields of American historical scholarship—women's history, history of children and the family, rural history, environmental history, labor history, history of science, and history of the West. Its method, however, is solidly grounded in the history of ideas—tracing the course of a particular idea within the currents of contemporary thought. Its central theme will mainly be of interest to those engaged in the study of reproduction. It will remain for other scholars to integrate Lovett's intellectual history of American pronatalism in the early twentieth century with the demographic and social realities of reproduction during that era.