Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India

3 “World Menace”: National Reproduction, Public Health, and the Mother India Debate

99 “Whenever India’s real condition becomes known,” said an American Public Health expert now in international service, “all the civilized countries of the world will turn to the League of Nations and demand protection against her.” —Katherine Mayo, Mother India The controversy surrounding the 1927 publication of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India was arguably the most important preindependence event between U.S. and Indian feminisms. An imperialist polemic against Indian self-rule thinly disguised as journalistic exposé, Mother India’s portrayal of the subcontinent as a cesspool of perverse reproductive practices and contagious diseases defined U.S. views of India for decades to come. Claiming to reveal “the truth about the sex life, child marriages, hygiene, cruelty, religious customs, of onesixth of the world’s population,”1 its lurid subject matter led, in part, to its immense popularity. Reprinted nine times within its first year of publication and forty-two times by 1937, it was the basis of a Broadway musical (Madame Nazimova’s India), and there was even an attempt to make it into a Hollywood film.2 As controversial as it was popular, Mother India generated a flurry of responses. Conferences were arranged to discuss its allegations and protests staged to refute them; all in all, more than fifty books and pamphlets were published in reaction to Mayo’s claims.3 Official British and U.S. public opinion was largely positive (there is even evidence that Mayo was enlisted by the British imperial propaganda machine, if unwittingly), while for Indian nationalists rallying against Mother India became a galvanizing cause.4 Despite Mother India’s international political reach, Mayo’s stated 3 “WORLD MENACE” National Reproduction, Public Health, and the Mother India Debate 100 “world menace” purpose in writing it was domestic. She opens chapter 1 by proclaiming she is “merely an ordinary American citizen seeking test facts to lay before [her] own people” (13). Why, however, would India be a matter of U.S. concern? As Mayo sees it, India is a site of dangerous cultural practices that in her vision not only inhabit India but could also travel to and infect the rest of the world. Rewriting the icon “Mother India” as the pathologized figure of a diseased body politic, Mayo articulates the United States’ international role as one of protecting women at home and abroad. What makes her argument so persuasive, however, are the insistent connections it draws between public health concerns and sexual habits. Naturalizing all of India as Hindu (a tactic not only in keeping with U.S. nomenclature of the time, but also exploitative of Hindu–Muslim communal tensions), Mother India argues that Indians are unfit for self-rule because primitive and debased Hindu sexual practices destroy the bodies of India’s women and deplete the bodies of India’s men. Through a chain of associations that link biology and culture, Mother India latches on to the explosive issue of child marriage to paint Indians as “broken-nerved, low-spirited, petulant ancients,” whose “hands are too weak, too fluttering, to seize or to hold the reins of government” (32). Understanding the circulation of culture through a model of contagious disease, Mother India figures India as a “world menace”—a public health problem that should elicit more fear than sympathy. I turn to the international firestorm caused by Mayo’s Mother India to argue that its dystopian vision of national reproduction is the dark double of the utopian eugenic reproduction upon which both Gilman’s and Naidu’s feminisms depend. Even though Gilman and Naidu understand eugenic reproduction as under threat from unfit subjects of various kinds, for each a notion of eugenic national progress nonetheless obtains. In contradistinction to this, Mayo focuses on the ways nationalism is imperiled by dysgenic reproduction. This obsession with national degeneration, however, reveals an investment in eugenic reproduction at least as strong as Gilman’s or Naidu’s. But Mayo takes this investment in a very different direction, turning her stance on national reproduction into an explicitly antifeminist “race-suicide” argument of the kind with which Gilman takes issue. In bringing her recognizably conservative politics to one of the key eugenic debates in India—child marriage—Mayo attempts to fashion herself as a crusader on behalf of oppressed Indian women. What she does not reckon for is that Indian na- “world menace” 101 tionalists and nationalist feminists had already made marriage...