Feminist Rhetorical Resilience

6. From “Mothers of the Nation” to “Mothers of the Race”: Nineteenth-Century Feminists and Eugenic Rhetoric

6 F R o m “ m ot h e R s o F t h e n at i o n ” to “ m ot h e R s o F t h e R ac e ” Nineteenth-Century Feminists and Eugenic Rhetoric Wendy Hayden Real progress is growth. It must begin in the seed. Anna Julia Cooper, “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race” Criminals are often made years and years before they are sentenced to prison. Alas! Too often made criminal before they are born. Adella Hunt Logan, “Hereditary and Prenatal Influences” [The] salvation of the world can only come through better children. Victoria Woodhull, “Tried as by Fire” Throughout the nineteenth century, women argued for education and other rights on the basis of “Republican motherhood”—they would be raising the nation’s future citizens.1 In the late nineteenth century, however, women’s importance as the bearers of these future citizens, whose minds and bodies they could mold before birth, created a new rhetoric of women’s rights—they were also the “mothers of the race.” As “mothers of the race,” many women argued that they required education , including scientific and hygienic education, recognition of their importance and their work in raising children, an identity within marriage , and rights to protect them from marital abuses. Most startling, some of these feminist rhetors began to demand sexual pleasure and the freedom to choose sex partners, regardless of the marriage laws, in order to bear healthy and intelligent children. At a time when many feminist advocates focused exclusively on suffrage, women in the social purity, racial uplift, and free-love movements proved the resilience of 182 FEM I N I ST RH ETORI CA L RESI LI EN C E feminist rhetorics by showing that women’s rights went beyond suffrage to include sexual freedom. Their methods, however, complicate the ways we analyze feminist rhetorical resilience. The feminist rhetors analyzed in this chapter employed a “mothers of the race” rhetoric to argue for their very different women’s rights agendas, but their discourse proved similar in participating and becoming complicit in the eugenic rhetoric beginning to proliferate in nineteenth-century arguments. This chapter tracks the collusion of feminist rights discourse with a discourse of eugenics. Admittedly, this is a collusion that may offend current feminist sensibilities. Yet it is critical that in regendering the rhetorical tradition, we do not shy away from acknowledging unpopular and unethical arguments. Furthermore, reading this uncomfortable facet of nineteenth-century feminist rhetoric within the context of rhetorical resilience helps us understand their often baffling rhetorical choices. “Mothers of the race” rhetoric demonstrates feminist resilience in the specific context of late nineteenth-century ideological and institutional relations. This chapter first examines these relations by elaborating the primary influence on the “mothers of the race” argument: the new sciences of the nineteenth century. The theories of evolution of Lamarck and Darwin, as well as theories of prenatal and hereditary transmission circulating in the medical community, helped to instigate this new dimension to women’s rights rhetoric because of the social capital of science in nineteenth-century culture. Thus, the rhetors discussed in this essay demonstrate mệtis, or the shape-shifting nature of feminist rhetorical resilience, by framing their arguments within a discourse valued by nineteenth-century audiences. Next, this chapter reviews how women rhetors in three different social movements—social purity, racial uplift, and free love—incorporated eugenic arguments to argue for their very different feminist agendas. While scientific and medical knowledge had often helped support ideologies that restricted women from receiving rights, these women rhetors used the new sciences of evolution and heredity to support arguments for women’s rights. The sciences not only provided an exigence for elevating women’s roles, but also gave feminist rhetors a method to critique prevailing ideologies of female sexuality. However, in doing so they participated in, and even helped shape, a new discourse of eugenics. In attempting to transform a “child culture”—a culture that revered children as the “hope of the race”—into a “woman’s culture” (Waisbrooker, Eugenics 17), feminists used eugenics as a means to attain women’s rights, and this chapter examines the popularity and From “Mothers of the Nation” to “Mothers of the Race” 183 implications for feminist rhetorical resilience of this “mothers of the race” argument. Eugenics, or the idea of improving the race through...