Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain by Angus McLaren (review)

So much has been written in recent years about reproduction and sexuality in interwar Britain that it is increasingly difficult to find original angles to explore. We have learned much about the influence of the eugenics movement and the pervasiveness of anxieties about the “deterioration of the race”; about the campaigns for better access to birth control, led by Marie Stopes, and, even more controversially, for women’s right to an abortion; about the new sexual assertiveness of modern young women and the opportunities and risks associated with London’s thriving queer culture; and about the various erotic entertainments provided by magazines, newspapers, books, and films. It takes a scholar of Angus McLaren’s erudition and range – he has written widely on many aspects of sexuality in Britain and elsewhere – to arrange these themes, and many more, in a fresh and distinctive way to provide a new perspective on this field. Other scholars have certainly situated interwar debates on sex, gender, and birth control in broader discussions about modernity, technology, and medical science – invariably citing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World along the way – but none has pursued these connections with the depth and creativity achieved in Reproduction by Design. McLaren demonstrates how a diverse and eclectic range of novelists, doctors, demographers, feminists, and conservationists, inspired by scientific and technological developments from the spread of the motor car to the discovery of hormones, produced a range of “science fictions” considering the future of reproduction and focusing, in particular, on the collapse of boundaries between the natural and the artificial in the sphere of sexuality. It becomes clear from the evidence presented here that Huxley’s dystopian visions of “mass production … applied to biology” were not especially innovative.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, “Speculative Literature and Mechanistic Progress,” examines the output of writers who projected forward the developments of interwar modernity and imagined the sexual world of the future. These authors repeatedly returned to a few central questions. What role would the state play in planning reproduction? How would gender relations be affected? How would cars – frequently sexualized – and, more remotely, robots alter the dynamics of reproduction and erotic culture? The second part concentrates on two specific developments in medical science: the emergence of hormone therapy, which promised to rejuvenate men who had lost their sexual vitality, and various forms of artificial insemination and ectogenesis, which promised the opportunity to radically alter the nature of reproduction and motherhood. Even if these techniques were rarely successful in this period, they were widely debated and offer revealing insights into contemporary attitudes toward sex and gender. The final chapter ranges further still, demonstrating how a collection of ruralists and conservationists linked the healthy reproduction of humans with the healthy reproduction of trees: an often eccentric fusion of eugenics and environmentalism that produced a futurist literature of its own.

McLaren’s aim throughout this stimulating survey is to ask fresh questions and highlight hitherto underexplored aspects of interwar culture, rather than to provide neat answers or definitive judgments. His central contribution is to set out more comprehensively than ever before the wide range of frequently fantastical ideas about the future of reproduction: he rarely seeks to define or measure the impact of these ideas, and he emphasizes that the works he studies are not necessarily representative of the writing of the period. At the same time, he concludes that eugenic anxieties provided the justification for a far more open and thoroughgoing public discussion of sexuality than some historians have admitted. Even experts in the study of interwar sexuality are likely to find new avenues to pursue in this impressive volume; anyone interested in British culture of the period can look forward to an enjoyable demonstration of how profoundly contemporary understandings of modernity were shaped by concerns about sexuality and reproduction.