Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India

Notes

217 Introduction 1. Margaret Sanger, “What Birth Control Can Do for India,” November 30, 1935. Typed speech. Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 4, 5. 2. Sarojini Naidu, “To India,” The Golden Threshold, 1905 (London: William Heinemann, 1916), 94. 3. Margaret Sanger, quoted in Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 99. 4. For a history of the creation and propagation of overpopulation discourse see Sarah Hodge, “Governmentality, Population and the Reproductive Family in Modern India,” Economic and Political Weekly, March 13–19, 2004, 1157–63. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4414767. 5. Although Gandhi was not a Malthusian, he nonetheless felt that the burgeoning population was a problem due to a colonial apparatus whose very modus operandi was the exploitation of resources. Given this, India couldn’t support more populationaslongascolonialrulecontinued.SeeSanjamAhluwalia,Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877–1947 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 6. Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Heinemann, 1977), 240. In Ehrlich’s famous rendition, “The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel?” Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968), 1. 7. Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 240. 8. Ibid., 240, 243. NOTES 218 notes to introduction 9. Ibid., 240. 10. Ibid., 257. 11. Sarah Hodges, “Towards a History of Reproduction in Modern India,” in Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies, ed. Sarah Hodges (New Delhi: Orient Longman), 16. 12. Sarah Hodges, “South Asia’s Eugenic Past,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 228. 13. For accounts of eugenics that similarly trace its endurance past the Second World War, see Daniel Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Connelly, Fatal Misconception; Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 14. Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 3. Although Grewal’s discussion of “transnational connectivities” in Transnational America is specifically concerned with the global processes of neoliberalism in the 1990s, in using this term to describe the relationship between the United States and India in the first part of the twentieth century I am following up her suggestion that “gender, race, class, and nationalism are produced by contemporary cultures in a transnational framework that is linked to earlier histories of colonization” (27). In my conceptualization of the transnational I am also borrowing upon Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s important, earlier theorization of it in their “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity,” Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 15. I am certainly not the first to recognize the ways in which feminism borrowed from eugenic discourse and eugenics borrowed from feminism. See Susanne Klausen and Alison Bashford, “Fertility Control: Eugenics, Neo-Malthusianism, and Feminism,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics; Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality (London: Penguin, 1995); Lesley Hall, “Women, Feminism and Eugenics,” in Essays in the History of Eugenics,ed.RobertA.Peel(London:GaltonInstitute,1998);AngeliqueRichardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Dana Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). notes to introduction 219 16. See Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White WorldSupremacy...