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

In Britain the emergence of the woman's movement in general and the so-called New Woman in particular coincided with the emergence of eugenics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A number of students of the British eugenics movement and eugenic thought have explored varying ideas about the special biological role allotted women in achieving the eugenics goal, which was, as Sir Francis Galton stated in 1883, the hereditary improvement of the "race," as the British populace was commonly described. Scholars have paid some attention to eugenicist thoughts about the likely effects on eugenics of expanded female education, economic, social, and intellectual opportunities, and, perhaps most important, the vote. But if the historiography of eugenics has addressed the issue of biologically sound marriages and selective "race motherhood" as an antidote to alleged racial deterioration, by contrast, according to Angelique Richardson, "feminist history and, in particular, feminist literary history, [have been reluctant] to accept the role played by women in the early history of eugenic thought" (xvii).

Although she says "many," Richardson is really referring to a few emancipated New Woman authors—Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Ellice Hopkins, Jane Hume Clapperton, and the anti-eugenicist Mona Caird—whose advanced, at times shocking, ideas about selective marriage, or mating, and the rational reproduction of genetically well-bred children are the focus of this work. While there are occasional passing references to other female authors such as Olive Schreiner and George Eliot, it is questionable that Richardson's rather limited roster of literary sources is enough to support her assertion that "the most sustained expressions of eugenic ideas were to be found in fiction." A quick review of the bibliographies and notes of the many important secondary works on eugenics that Richardson lists in her bibliography and on which she relies for much of her information about the eugenics movement would indicate that the sources for the history of eugenic thought are more diverse and extensive than the genre of fiction. Richardson notes that more than a hundred novels and even more short stories were published by and about the New Woman in the last two decades of the nineteenth century but presents no evidence to help readers know how extensive the eugenic feminist ideas that she describes really were, even in New Woman circles. Those ideas, at least as represented in the authors whose work she analyzes, focused on a maternalist agenda that emphasized a progressive concept of "civic motherhood" and the responsibility "in the context of British fears of racial decline and imperial loss" of modern, emancipated women to take responsibility for the "rational selection of reproductive partners" with whom they would produce a new generation of physically and intellectually fit, eugenic children.

Before turning to specific authors, Richardson uses the first four chapters of her book to summarize the major features of eugenic thought as it emerged in the writings of Galton and his followers as well as some of the critical social issues and problems that fed eugenicists' anxieties and their post-Darwinian belief in the dominance of nature over nurture. Drawing selectively on the extensive secondary literature that explores the relationships among biological thought, social change, and eugenics in the later Victorian years, she first examines how mounting concerns about the proliferation of the urban poor, primarily in the East End of London, quickly became tied up with widespread, hereditarian fears about degeneration. The "biologization of poverty," the concept that the poor, or the "residuum," were a separate breed whose deterioration was biologically determined, was not only an important stimulus to eugenics but an important theme in the writings of many novelists, including the few eugenic feminists Richardson considers.

The lesson they learned from the displacement of environmental explanations of social decay by hereditary causes was that no amount of education, moralizing, or even charity could alter the dominant consequences of defective germplasm. For Richardson's...