The Racial Imperatives of Sex: birth control and eugenics in Britain, the United States and Australia in the interwar years
2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09612025.2012.658180
ISSN1747-583X
Autores Tópico(s)European history and politics
ResumoAbstract While most historical studies position Western birth control campaigns as arising out of the women's movement, this article suggests they were primarily eugenic, rather than feminist, even if many of the leading figures were women. Birth control gained support largely through its representation as a tool for (white) racial progress and population control, rather than as an issue of women's rights. Indeed, in the interwar years birth control and eugenics were so intertwined as to be synonymous. The article explores the Malthusian writings of Annie Besant; the remarkably similarly ways that Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger promoted birth control as a eugenic tool; the support for birth control within both British and American eugenics organisations; and finally Australia's largest eugenic organisation, the Racial Hygiene Association, which founded the country's first birth control clinic in 1933 and later reinvented itself as the Family Planning Association. Recovering these links allows us to see how birth control was fundamentally linked to broader, transnational discussions of race and reproduction, and of how sex should be harnessed for racial purposes. Acknowledgements My thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their most helpful comments. This research was supported initially by an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship and subsequently by a Monash University Fellowship. Notes Margaret Sanger (1914) Family Limitation (New York: Review Publishing Company), p. 15. Annie Besant (1877) The Law of Population (London: Freethought Publishing Company), pp. 42–43 (my emphasis). Marie Stopes (1921) cited in The Mothers' Clinic for Birth Control (London: The Clinic), pp. 10–11 (my emphasis). For Sanger's account of this period, and the letter, see Margaret Sanger (2004 [1938]) The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger (New York: Courier Dover Publications). Similar campaigns also emerged in New Zealand: Nina Barrer Papers, MS-Papers-0182-039, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. Thanks to Angela Wanhalla and Joanne Richdale for alerting me to this archive. Key works on birth control in the United States and Britain are cited below. There is little Australian scholarship, but see Nicole Moore (2005) Treasonous Sex: birth control obscenity censorship and white Australia, Australian Feminist Studies, 20 (48), pp. 319–342; Stefania Siedlecky and Diana Wyndham (1990) Populate and Perish: Australian women's fight for birth control (Sydney: Allen & Unwin); Farley Kelly (1982) Mrs Smyth and the Body Politic, in Margaret Bevege, Margaret James & Carmel Shute (Eds) Worth her Salt: women at work in Australia (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger), pp. 213–229. For some of the links between eugenics and birth control in Australia, see Ann Curthoys (1989) Eugenics, Feminism and Birth Control: the case of Marion Piddington, Hecate, 15 (1), pp. 73–89. Curthoys concludes Piddington was primarily concerned with women's rights. My reading is somewhat different. One notable exception is Richard Soloway (1995) The 'Perfect Contraceptive': eugenics and birth control research in Britain and America in the interwar years, Journal of Contemporary History, 30 (4), pp. 637–664. Linda Gordon (2002) The Moral Property of Women: a history of birth control politics in America, rev. edn (Urbana: University of Illinois Press). For Britain see particularly Richard Soloway (1982) Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). Alexander Sanger (2007) Eugenics, Race, and Margaret Sanger Revisited: reproductive freedom for all?, Hypatia, 22 (2), pp. 210–217; Miriam Reed (2003) Margaret Sanger: her life in her words (Fort Lee: Barricade Books); Carol McCann (1999) Birth Control Politics in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press); Ellen Chesler (1992) Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement in America (New York: Double Day). For a recent historiographical overview of Sanger scholarship see Joyce Berkman (2011), The Question of Margaret Sanger, History Compass, 9, pp. 474–484. This still seeks to support Sanger against 'attacks' that she was a eugenicist or a racist, and these aspects are not the major focus of the article. A recent historiographical overview of scholarship on birth control in the United States only briefly mentions work on its relationship to eugenics, although it does discuss the issue of race more fully: Joyce Berkman (2011) The Fertility of Scholarship on the History of Reproductive Rights in the United States, History Compass, 9, pp. 433–447. Many histories of birth control in the US and Britain barely mention or completely ignore eugenics: Susan E. Klepp (2009) Revolutionary Conceptions: women, fertility, and family limitation in America, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press); Kate Fisher (2006) Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain, 1918–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Lesley Hoggart (2004) Feminist Campaigns for Birth Control and Abortion Rights in Britain (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press); Hera Cook (2004) The Long Sexual Revolution: English women, sex, and contraception, 1800–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Again, Soloway's work is an exception. For links between eugenics and birth control in other contexts see Rahul Nair (2011) The Construction of a 'Population Problem' in Colonial India 1919–1947, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39 (2), pp. 227–247; Richard David Sonn (2005) 'Your body is yours': anarchism, birth control, and eugenics in interwar France, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14 (4), pp. 415–432; Susanne M Klausen (2004) Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910–39 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), as well as the chapters by Hodges and Chung cited in note 18 below. Angela Franks (2005) Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: the control of female fertility (Jefferson: McFarland). This work reflects Franks's contemporary 'pro-life' agenda. Chesler, Woman of Valor; June Rose (1992) Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution (London: Farber and Farber). See also Robert A. Peel (Ed) (1997) Marie Stopes, Eugenics and the English Birth Control Movement (London: Galton Institute). Soloway's chapter aside, even this collection largely avoids Stopes's eugenic ambitions. As Cohen notes, few 'ordinary' women practised birth control for eugenic reasons. But her inference that the Eugenics Society remained resolutely hostile to birth control and that Stopes's clinics violated eugenic principles is less accurate: Deborah Cohen (1993) Private Lives in Public Spaces: Marie Stopes, the mothers' clinics and the practice of contraception, History Workshop, no. 35, pp. 95–116. Gordon argues 'Birth control reformers were not attracted to eugenics because they were racists; rather, they had interests in common with eugenicists and had no strong tradition of antiracism on which to base a critique of eugenics': Moral Property, p. 196. Anna Davin (1978) Imperialism and Motherhood, History Workshop Journal, 5, pp. 9–65. Gordon views eugenics as intrinsically anti-feminist. She is thus only able to establish a feminist history for birth control by including campaigns which argued for women's right not to marry or to refuse sex with their husband. Although beyond the scope of this article, the broader relationship between feminism/the women's movement and eugenics is obviously a closely related topic. The Australian women's movement strongly supported segregation and sterilisation of the 'unfit' and immigration restrictions (but not birth control). Women were prominent in the eugenics movements of all three countries: Jane Carey (2009) 'Women's Objective—A Perfect Race': whiteness, eugenics and the articulation of race, in Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey & Katherine Ellinghaus (Eds) Re-Orienting Whiteness (New York: Palgrave), pp. 183–198; Jane Carey (2009) White Anxieties and the Articulation of Race: the women's movement and the making of white Australia, 1910s–1930s, in Jane Carey & Claire McLisky (Eds) Creating White Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press), pp. 195–213. Alexandra Stern (2010) also discusses women's ambivalent relation to eugenics, globally, in terms both the extent of their involvement in the movement and the varying degrees of empowerment it could provide to (especially middle-class) women, in her short overview chapter, Gender and Sexuality: a global tour and compass, in Alison Bashford & Philippa Levine (Eds) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 173–191. Susanne Klausen and Alison Bashford's chapter in this collection (Fertility Control: eugenics, neo- Malthusianism, and feminism) also discusses the relationship between eugenics and feminism, observing that 'put simply, eugenicists saw women's social role as determined by their reproductive function'. But they also note that feminists, all over the world, also 'enthusiastically produced and incorporated eugenics in their campaigns' (pp. 109–110). Angelique Richardson (2003) argues that the most sustained discussions of eugenics in late nineteenth century Britain was within fiction, particularly feminist/'New Woman' fiction of this period, and thus that there was an 'intimate' relationship' between early British feminism and eugenics; Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: rational reproduction and the new woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press). See also, Angela Wanhalla (2007) 'To Better the Breed of Men': women and eugenics in New Zealand, 1900–1935, Women's History Review, 16 (2), pp. 163–182; Lucy Bland (1993) Banishing the Beast: English feminism and sexual morality, 1885–1914 (London: Penguin); George Robb (1998) 'Eugenics, Spirituality, and Sex Differentiation in Edwardian England: the case of Frances Swiney', Journal of Women's History, 10 (3), pp. 97–117; Amy Bix (1997) Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-workers: 'women's work' in biology, Social Studies of Science, 27(4), pp. 625–668; Ann Taylor Allen (2000) Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900–1940: a comparative perspective, German Studies Review, 23 (3), pp. 477–505; Mary Ziegler (2008) Eugenic Feminism: mental hygiene, the women's movement, and the campaign for eugenic legal reform, 1900–1935, Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, 31, pp. 211–235. Some other general histories of eugenics very briefly note women's strong presence: Daniel Kevles (1998 [1985]) In the Name of Eugenics: genetics and the uses of human heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); Frank Dikotter (1998) Race Culture: recent perspectives on the history of eugenics, American Historical Review, 103 (2), pp. 467–478. Catriona Beaumont (2007) Moral Dilemmas and Women's Rights: the attitude of the mothers' union and Catholic women's league to divorce, birth control and abortion in England, 1928–1939, Women's History Review, 16 (4), pp. 463-485; Bland, Banishing the Beast; Gordon, Moral Property; Kelly, Mrs Smyth. My own extensive research into the Australian National Council of Women, the country's largest women's group, has revealed this issue was barely discussed before WWII. On the diversity of eugenics see Nancy Stepan (1991) 'The Hour of Eugenics': race, gender and nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). The literature on eugenics in Britain and the United States is vast. See for example: Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics; Dikotter, Race Culture. For Australia see Martin Crotty, John Germov & Grant Rodwell (Eds) (2000) A Race for Place: eugenics, Darwinism and social thought and practice in Australia (Newcastle: University of Newcastle); Stephen Garton (1994) Sound Minds and Healthy Bodies: re-considering eugenics in Australia, 1914–1940, Australian Historical Studies, 26 (103), pp. 163–181. Thus, for example, Gordon substantially underestimates eugenicists' support for birth control. The excellent Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics takes a broad transnational perspective, particularly in its first thematic section, redressing the narrow geographical focus of most previous scholarship. However, only five pages of the ∼550 pages of text specifically discuss birth control as a eugenic measure. Susanne Klausen and Alison Bashford's chapter (Fertility Control: eugenics, neo-Malthusianism, and feminism) does note that eugenic references were 'commonplace' in birth control campaigns, but stops short of fully incorporating birth control and eugenics (pp. 99–104). They do conclude that 'although fertility control is most readily associated with the history of feminism … [birth control activists] were as likely to be motivated by neo-Malthusian and eugenic ideas as by feminist ideas' (pp. 110–111). Birth control is briefly mentioned elsewhere, and Sarah Hodges chapter on South Asia and Yuehtsen Juliette Chung's chapter on Hong Kong do note that in these places similarly, birth control and eugenics were virtually indistinguishable (pp. 229–230 and 266–269 respectively). As Stone notes, British eugenics is often portrayed as concerned only with class, not race: Dan Stone (2001) Race in British Eugenics, European History Quarterly, 31 (3), pp. 397–425. Gordon, Moral Property. Some recent scholarship firmly repositions birth control movements within global population politics, although their eugenic/racial dimensions are not the primary focus: Alison Bashford (2008) Population, Geopolitics, and International Organizations in the Mid Twentieth Century, Journal of World History, 19 (3), pp. 327–347; Matthew Connelly (2008) Fatal Misconceptions: the struggle to control world population (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press). Bland, Banishing the Beast; Anne Taylor (1992) Annie Besant: a biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant (1877) Publishers' Preface, in Charles Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy: an essay on the population question, 2nd edn with notes (London: Freethought Publishing Company), pp. v–vi (emphasis in original). Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy, p. 14 (emphasis added). This text may have been altered by the editors. Besant, Law of Population, pp. 12–13. Ibid., pp. 42–43 (emphasis added). Ibid., p. 1. Francis Galton (1904) Eugenics: its definition, scope and aims, Sociological Papers (London: Macmillan & Co.), p. 45 (emphasis added). Galton, Eugenics; Karl Pearson (1914, 1924, 1930) The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Karl Pearson (1904) Discussion, Sociological Papers (London: Macmillan & Co.), p. 53. Eugenics Education Society Minutes (EES Minutes), 2 October 1911, Eugenics Education Society Archives (EES Archives), Wellcome Library, London, SA/EUG/L.2. Marie Stopes Papers, British Library, Add. 58644 and EES Archives, SA/EUG/K.1 Stopes, Mothers' Clinic, pp. 3–4 (emphasis in original). The Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, EES Archives, SA/EUG/K.1. Marie Stopes (1924) Married Love, 16th edn (London: Putnam's Sons), p. 123. Marie Stopes (1923) Wise Parenthood, 12th edn (London: Putnam's Sons), pp. v, vii (emphasis added). Ibid., pp. 18, 19, 27. Marie Stopes (1920) Radiant Motherhood (London: Putnam's Son's), pp. 171, 173, 212, 225. Margaret Sanger (1917) The Case for Birth Control (New York: Modern Art Printing co.), p. 3. Margaret Sanger (2007 [1920]) Woman and the New Race (New York: BiblioBazaar), pp. 13–14, 27, 126–127. Margaret Sanger (1922) The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Bretano's Publishers), p. 22. Margaret Sanger (1921) Birth Control Review, 5 (10), p. 5. See also Margaret Sanger (1917) An Answer to Mr. Roosevelt, Birth Control Review, 1 (12), p. 14. From figures in F. M. Vreeland (1929) The Process of Reform, cited in Gordon, Moral Property, p. 197. Margaret Sanger (1919) Birth Control Review, 3 (2), pp. 11–12. Margaret Sanger (1932) Birth Control Review, 16 (4), pp. 107–108. (1921) Principles and Objects of the American Birth Control League (New York: American Birth Control League). Margaret Sanger (1922) Proceedings of the First American Birth Control Conference (New York: Birth Control Review), pp. 14–16. Ibid., pp. 56–57, 58. Ibid., p. 257. Charles Drysdale (1922) in Raymond Pierpoint (Ed) Report of the Fifth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference (London: William Heinemann), pp. v, 3. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., pp. 37–38. Kelly, Mrs Smyth. Brettena Smyth (1894) The Social Evil: its causes and cure (Melbourne: Rae Brothers), title page. Cited in Kelly, Mrs Smyth, p. 225. Racial Hygiene Association Minutes (RHA Minutes), 11 July 1927, Family Planning Association Records (FPA Records), MLMSS 3838, Mitchell Library, Sydney. RHA Minutes, 16 December 1927, 7 November 1929, 18 March 1930, 1 June 1931, 7 November 1932, 9 November 1932, 22 June 1933; General Secretary's Report of Work for the Year Ending 30 June 1933, FPA Records. Ruby Rich Papers, What Racial Hygiene Means!!, MS 7493, folder 423 (Rich Papers), National Library of Australia, Canberra. RHA, Birth Control Clinic, Rich Papers. Racial Hygiene Association, Annual Report, 1940–41, Rich Papers. Resume of Racial Hygiene Association Work, 1938, FPA Records. The Association collated statistics of the reasons why women visited the clinic, which were published in their Annual Reports. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 June 1927. Resolution passed 28 September 1933, Stopes Papers, Wellcome Library, PP/MCS/A.308 (emphasis added). Stopes wanted this forwarded to the Australian Prime Minister. Marian Piddington (1921) Australian Highway, 3 (10), pp. 11–12. Marian Piddington (1916) Via Nuova or Science & Maternity (Sydney: Dymock's Book Arcade, Ltd.), p. 23. See also Stopes Papers, Wellcome Institute Library, PP/MCS, file A.307. Anon. (1916–1917) Eugenics Review, 8, pp. 222–223. C. V. Drysdale (1914) The Empire and the Birth Rate (London: Royal Colonial Institute), pp. 1–2, 18 (emphasis in original). Marie Stopes (1919) How Mrs. Jones Does her Worst, London Daily Mail, 13 June. EES minutes, 13 June 1922. Eugenics Education Society, Annual Reports for 1926–8, 1935–40; EES Minutes, 13 June 1922, 11 November 1925, 9 June 1926, 13 October 1926, 5 July 1933, 13 December 1933, 1 January 1935, 17 March 1936, 6 October 1936, 24 November 1936, 14 February 1938, 8 November 1938, 7 March 1939; and the Birth Control Investigation Committee Minutes, EES Archives, SA/EUG/L.64. See also Soloway, The 'Perfect Contraceptive'. C. P. Blacker (1936) The Eugenics Society and the National Birth Control Association, 22 September, EES Archives, SA/EUG/D.18. Minutes of Joint Meeting of Representatives of the National Birth Control Association of the Council of the Eugenics Society, 3 December 1936, EES Archives, SA/EUG/D.23. Recommendations as to the Future Relations of the National Birth Control Association to the Eugenics Society, April 1937, EES Archives, SA/EUG/D.18. McCann, Birth Control Politics. Cited in Gordon, Moral Property, p. 202. For example, Franks, Margaret Sanger; and her pro-life website: http://www.angelafranks.com; Ann Farmer (2008) By Their Fruit: eugenics, population control, and the abortion campaign (Washington: Catholic University of America Press). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJane CareyJane Carey is a Monash Fellow in the Monash Indigenous Centre and the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research at Monash University. Her current research explores the (racial) politics of population in British settler colonies from the mid-nineteenth century into the recent past. Jane's previous work examined race and whiteness in the Australian women's movement. She has co-edited three collections on historical understandings of whiteness: Historicising Whiteness (RMIT Publishing, 2007), Re-Orienting Whiteness (Palgrave, 2009), and Creating White Australia (Sydney University Press, 2009), and has a forthcoming monograph on the history of Australian women and science.
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