Eugenic Feminism: Asian Reproduction in the U.S. National Imaginary

Abstract

In an 1895 poem, Burden of Mothers: A Clarion Call to Redeem Race!/' Charlotte Perkins Gilman launches an argument that places women's reproductive powers at center of nation building. On grounds that through [women] comes (8), she insists as long as women are fettered with gold or with iron (7) humanity will be besotted, and brutish, and blind (14). But while her address is ostensibly to entire human her model is more national than global. Asserting that No nation, wise, noble and brave / Ever sprang tho' father had freedom / From mother a slave! (22-24), Gilman links fate of nation to its mothers: how can a nation rise to glory if half its population is enslaved? If women [make] men of world (12), then country where women enjoy most freedom must be country with superior race. Gilman thus enjoins American men to give American women equal rights not for women's sake but for nation's. The logic that Gilman elaborates is not particular to her alone. Feminists have rightly critiqued nationalism (in both its imperial and anti-colonial guises) for its masculinist and heterosexist deployment of female body. Until very recently, however, postcolonial and Anglo-American feminist criticism has neglected active role that feminist movements play in consolidating nation on and around bodies of women. This essay focuses on feminist investment in nationalism to show that early twentieth-century feminists in U.S. and India rely on reproduction to obtain a privileged position for a modern feminist subject within nation. I use phrase eugenic feminism1 to refer not only to U.S. and Indian feminism's historical engagement with eugenics movement but also to rhetoric of feminism itself. Eugenic feminism is a selfpurifying and self-perfecting rhetoric that works to create a feminist subject who, free of race, guarantees reproduction of sovereign nation. In so doing, feminism comes to depend on race in form of phantom and figurai racial others to shape an identity in negative terms, defining what a feminist subject must avoid incorporating in order to advance nation as a whole. While this definition should immediately bring to mind how African American women are excluded from the American, in this essay I am concerned with place of Asian women in construction of national ideal. Through a reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's economic theory and Utopian novels, I will elaborate logic of feminism in order to demonstrate how, at turn of century, an American feminist subject was constructed in relation to abject Asian womanhood. I will then go on to trace this construction though Katherine Mayo's 1927 travelogue, Mother India, revealing how pathological Asian motherhood is figured as a contagion from which American women must be protected.