Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (review)

This succinct and entertaining book, first published in 2003, examines how feminists, especially New Woman writers like Sarah Grand and George Egerton, employed eugenic ideas to argue “for the vital contribution of women in regenerating the British imperial race” (xv). Angelique Richardson convincingly argues for the central role played by women in the popularization of eugenics, the now-discredited but once highly influential science of selective breeding, in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. This new paperback edition should give the book a wider readership, which it richly deserves.

The eugenics movement, which reached its high point in the early twentieth century, not surprisingly became enmeshed in political and cultural debates over the “woman question.” With its emphasis on reproduction and racial regeneration, eugenics was inextricably linked to contemporary concerns regarding marriage, motherhood, and appropriate gender roles. Just as Victorian medicine provided biological justification for the subordination of women, eugenics could also bolster traditional gender hierarchies. Conservative eugenists, such as the movement’s founder, Francis Galton, feared that the achievement of feminist goals would divert the most accomplished women from their primary eugenic responsibility: motherhood.

Still, as Richardson argues, eugenics was not only a tool of patriarchy. Women were active in the British Eugenics Society, and many prominent eugenists such as Karl Pearson and Caleb Saleeby supported suffrage and higher education for women. Eugenic ideas and language were also widely employed by British feminists to buttress their arguments for liberation. This is an aspect of eugenic thought that has been underappreciated by historians and literary critics, though not to the extent that Richardson imagines. The claim that she “explores for the first time, the intimate relations between eugenics and some feminists” is an exaggeration (i). A number of scholars—Rosaleen Love, Lucy Bland, Joy Dixon, and myself—have examined feminist eugenics, though much of our work is unacknowledged by Richardson in her notes and bibliography.

Such complaints aside, Love and Eugenics is a marvelous survey of the eugenics movement and its intersections with Victorian feminism and popular culture. Based on an extensive reading of primary source materials —journalistic debates, popular scientific writings, New Woman novels, and the correspondence of prominent eugenists—Richardson’s book vividly brings to life a lost world of fin de siècle social fears and scientific bravado. The author provides brief but lucid overviews of evolutionary thought, hereditarian debates, the scientific construction of women, and social purity crusades. Disparate strands of Victorian culture are drawn deftly together.

After introductory chapters covering eugenics, feminism, and social purity politics, the book concentrates on the eugenic writings of three prominent feminists: Sarah Grand, George Egerton, and Mona Caird. In her day, Grand was the most celebrated proponent of eugenic love, and her best-selling novels, The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897), explored the misery of marrying without rational selection. Like most social purity feminists, Grand argued that men had a natural tendency toward vice and promiscuity, while women had instincts for virtue and chastity. Women should therefore be given the chief role in the making of marriages, as only they “were sufficiently race aware to make responsible sexual choices” (56). Richardson gives astute readings of Grand’s novels, especially highlighting the author’s antipathy to sentimental, romantic novels and the degenerative effects of modern culture. In The Heavenly Twins, for example, the heroine, Evadne, prefers reading medical textbooks to silly love stories. Armed with such knowledge, she avoids marriage to a syphilitic, unlike the more conventional Edith, who dies after giving birth to a deformed child.

Like Sarah Grand, the writer George Egerton (the penname of Mary Dunne Bright) also promoted the idea that women were more in touch with nature and thus better able to select biologically fit fathers for their children. However, as Richardson points out, Egerton was more socially radical, often seeing marriage and conventional morality as obstacles to good breeding. In Egerton...