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3 / The Eugenics of Bad Girls: Abortion, Popular Fiction, and Population Control Were the white world to-day really convinced of the supreme importance of race-values, how long would it take to stop debasing immigration, reform social abuses that are killing out the fittest strains, and put an end to the feuds which have just sent us through hell and threaten to send us promptly back again? —Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy The history of American eugenics is a history of difference. This chapter begins with an outline of an abbreviated history of eugenics to illustrate how the American obsession with race in the early twentieth century was very much focused on building knowledge about how populations differ from each other and how this knowledge about difference could be used to manage lives. As Catherine Mills succinctly argues, “The normalizing forces of racism, which allow for the biological fracturing of population and designating of some races as inferior, are the mechanisms by which a state is able ‘to exercise its sovereign power.’”1 By interpreting sovereignty along more Focauldian lines as a kind of power that is not solely exercised by the head of state but also replicated and dispersed through family, church, and other institutionalized centers, this chapter examines how antiabortion discourse in popular literature theorizes the connection among power, nationhood, reproduction, and ideals of motherhood. Antiabortion sentiments, I argue, are based in racist ideologies that carve out antagonistic populations wary of the messiness of reproduction and its potential to erase population lines. Thus, any law that worked to control women’s reproductive functions was welcomed within the climate of anxiety created by eugenic theories.2 I’ll be arguing here that antiabortion rhetoric was used as a means to both discipline and ultimately threaten middle-class, white women to behave according to the norms of early twentieth-century womanhood and motherhood and that the ideology of eugenics, which in the early the eugenics of bad girls / 67 twentieth century gained a foothold in popular culture and scientific thought, shaped American attitudes toward women’s reproduction. This argument builds on Dale Bauer’s conclusion, where she writes, “Sexualizing relations became a way of marking the middle class off from what once were the ‘decadence’ and delinquence of the working class and the absolute sanctuary of the leisure class and its unspoken, sometimes unexplained, sexual practices.”3 Eugenics and the abortion rhetoric that emerged from its policies became a means to distinguish a new middle class and construct sexual norms for its members. As chapter 2 already demonstrated, Anthony Comstock and Margaret Sanger also focused on contributing to middle-class mores, which were quickly becoming the object of eugenic ideology. This chapter will continue that argument to show how antiabortion rhetoric was keenly tied to eugenic sentiments as a means of shaping an emerging white middle class. In 1922 Lothrop Stoddard, an ardent eugenicist and white supremacist, posed the rhetorical question that forms the epigraph at the beginning this chapter. His question does not have an ounce of irony, although a present -day reader might scoff at such a ridiculous attitude. In his time, and for almost his entire career, during which he published several polemical works on the subject of white supremacy, Stoddard was respected and heeded. Presidents Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover praised his work,4 and birth control activist Margaret Sanger asked Stoddard to join the board of the Birth Control League. Stoddard, who received his PhD at Harvard, was viewed as a rational and scientific thinker, and the majority of reviews commenting on his work depict him as such. Part of his appeal was that, unlike his predecessor Madison Grant, who was one of the founders of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a well-known eugenicist, Stoddard praised all whites as superior to other races without singling out Nordics as Grant did.5 The motivation behind Stoddard’s work is quite transparent: underlying his writing is a deep anxiety that whites will be soon be outnumbered in the United States. He points out that around the world whites reproduce less than people of other races, which he believed would soon lead to the demise of whiteness, or, in his words, the “fitter race.” As he passionately argues, “Everywhere the better types (on which the future of the race depends) were numerically stationary or dwindling, while conversely, the lower types were gaining ground, their...

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