Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India

Introduction: Eugenic Feminism and the Problem of National Development

1 Speaking in a 1935 radio broadcast in Bombay titled “What Birth Control Can Do for India,” American birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger outlined the importance of reproductive control to the incipient Indian nation. Long sympathetic to the cause of Indian independence (at this point still twelve years away), Sanger trotted out the usual arguments about the necessity of birth control for maternal and familial health. Eugenic concerns, however, were at the forefront of her address. Saying she is “[bringing] this message at a critical time in [India’s] history,” Sanger proposed that “[India’s] first consideration must be the primary one of what kind of people you are going to have in the future. You need as never before, the finest men and women possible, the strongest, spiritually, intellectually and physically. This means you must give consideration to what kind of children you are now bringing into the world to take up the responsibilities of your nation in the future.”1 Linking birth control to the project of Indian nation building, Sanger deliberately aligned her message with Indian feminists who used precisely such eugenic arguments to create a space for feminism within nationalism. Middle-class Indian nationalist feminists such as Rani Laxmibai Rajwade, Lakshmi Menon, and Sarojini Naidu similarly mobilized a language of eugenic reproductive futurity as the motor of nationalist feminist politics, arguing for right reproduction as the way to assure a more perfect national and feminist future. Taking literally the nationalist symbol “Mother India,” such feminists posited the reproductive agency of India’s women as the key to a reinvigorated Indian nationalism. As Sarojini Naidu memorably put it in her 1904 poem “To India” (first recited at the Eighteenth Session of the INTRODUCTION Eugenic Feminism and the Problem of National Development 2 introduction Indian National Congress), Mother India must shake off her “gloom” and “beget new glories from [her] ageless womb.”2 Sanger may have focused on a positive eugenic message of making “the finest men and women possible” in her 1935 radio broadcast, but her interest in India was also motivated by a negative eugenic concern with improper reproduction on a world scale. Her explicit aims in visiting India (as described in a letter to eugenicist C. P. Blacker) were “first, to bring the poorer and biologically worse endowed stocks the knowledge of birth control that is already prevalent among those who are both genetically and economically better favored, and secondly, to bring the birth rates of the East more in line with those of . . . the civilizations of the West.”3 Her choice of India was not incidental, as colonial censuses and famine control policies from the 1870s onward had painted a dire picture of India’s high birth and death rates, creating the global perception that India was desperately diseased and overpopulated.4 For Indian nationalists, colonial mismanagement was at fault (even as there was a national injunction toward right reproduction ), while for imperialist feminists like Sanger the problem was irresponsible reproduction by the “poorer and biologically worse endowed stocks.” Despite her overtly racial interest in birth control in India, Sanger was positively received by Indian eugenic and women’s organizations (indeed, the All-India Women’s Conference passed a resolution in support of birth control). She did meet a major obstacle in the person of M. K. Gandhi, who agreed that population growth was a problem but felt abstinence was the only solution.5 Although this Gandhian resistance to birth control persisted into the 1950s through such key figures as Health Minister Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, the post-independence climate was nonetheless ripe for Sanger’s message when she decided to hold the 1952 Third International Conference on Planned Parenthood in Bombay. Part of the reason she chose India for the conference was the birth control advocacy of Lady Dhanvanti Rama Rau. Often referred to as the “Margaret Sanger of India” (a title that flattens out Rama Rau’s longer history of social and feminist work in India and also mistakenly implies that India came to eugenics and birth control belatedly), Rama Rau was involved in a range of work for the rights of women and the poor over her long lifetime. Family planning advocacy was her enduring cause, however; she founded the Family Planning Association of India in 1949 and was the cofounder, with Sanger and introduction 3 Elise Ottesen-Jensen of Sweden, of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952. Although...