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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Life sciences: general issues > Genetics (non-medical)
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Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century - Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Paperback)
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Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century - Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Paperback)
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The idea of eugenics - human selective breeding - originated in
Victorian Britain in response to the urban poor. Darwin's
evolutionary theory had laid the foundations for eugenics,
replacing paradise with primordial slime. Man had not fallen from
Grace, but risen from the swamps. And, as architect of his own
destiny, he might rise still further. Eugenics was developed by
Darwin's cousin Francis Galton in the 1860s. Embracing the idea of
evolution, eugenists argued that through the judicious control of
human reproduction, and the numerical increase of the middle class,
Britain's supremacy in the world maintained. Born and bred among
the competitive Victorian middle class, eugenics was a biologistic
discourse on class. Aiming at 'racial improvement' by altering the
balance of class in society, it was, Galton argued, 'practical
Darwinism'. Eugenics found its most sustained expression in fiction
and the periodical press, and was central to late
nineteenth-century ideas on social progress forming part of the
debate between hereditarians and environmentalists that peaked in
the closing years of the century. Even Gladstone had his vital
statistics measured in Galton's eugenic laboratory. Among the
champions of eugenics were social purity feminists and New Women,
writers such as George Egerton, Ellice Hopkins, and Sarah Grand,
who argued that women were naturally- biologically - moral, and
that through rational reproduction middle-class women could
regenerate the British imperial race. The New Woman has been the
subject of numerous critical works in the last ten years or so.
However, the oppressive ideas that coexisted with the emancipatory
theories of some New Women - ideas that were supremely class
conscious - remain largely unexamined, as the focus remains on her
more progressive aspects. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth
Century recontextualizes New Woman writers, demonstrating that they
were as concerned with the questions of poverty, sickness and
health as they were with the changing role of women, the issue for
which they are currently generally known and celebrated. Focusing
on fiction and the press, and drawing on the papers and published
work of Galton and other eugenists, Love and Eugenics in the Late
Nineteenth Century reveals the cultural pervasiveness of eugenics
and explores, for the first time, the intimate relations between
early feminism and eugenics, and making a radical contribution to
nineteenth-century studies.
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