Eugenic Feminism Research Articles

Chloroformed: Anesthetic Utopianism and Eugenic Feminism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Other Works

Chloroformed: Anesthetic Utopianism and Eugenic Feminism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Other Works

“In Women’s Hands”

Eugenics had popular appeal and expressions in early 20th-century Denmark. This article tells two stories of what eugenics looked like ‘in the hands’ of bourgeois Danish women as they promoted ‘racial hygiene’ through cultural production. The first story highlights the eugenic feminism of nationally acclaimed women’s rights advocate Thit Jensen through a reading of her play The Stork (1929). The second tells of the Copenhagen Housewife Association’s engagement with new media technology and race science through their eugenics radio Listener Group (1934). Read through a lens that pays especially close attention to race and class, I argue that this work identifies them as significant proponents of eugenic ideology and as contributors to the targeting of the poor and working class in the name of ‘racial hygiene’ – a decidedly racist project.

Domestic Ecology and Autoimmunity: Eugenic Feminism in the Sixth Extinction

Initially hailed as an ur-text for feminist scholarship upon its first reprint in 1973, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) has undergone a significant historicist reevaluation, beginning in the 1990s, which condemned the story on behalf of its author’s investments in eugenic feminism, the view that women’s reproductive roles should be weaponized as a

Differing Conceptions of "Voluntary Motherhood": Yamakawa Kikue's Birth Strike and Ishimoto Shizue's Eugenic Feminism

Differing Conceptions of "Voluntary Motherhood":Yamakawa Kikue's Birth Strike and Ishimoto Shizue's Eugenic Feminism Sujin Lee (bio) The Multiple Definitions of "Voluntary Motherhood" in Interwar Japan In March and April 1922, American birth control activist Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) visited Japan to promote the concept and techniques of birth control. In her first lecture, held at the Tokyo Y.M.C.A. on March 14, Sanger addressed an audience of over five hundred people on the subject of "War and Population" (Japan Times 1922). Sanger attributed colonization and militarism to an overflowing population, as typified in Germany before the outbreak of World War I, and urged Japanese audiences to address similar issues facing Japan. Sanger's accounts of overpopulation were anchored in Neo-Malthusianism—the advocacy of birth control to ensure the balance between population size and resource supply; she believed that Japan's rising population would lead to domestic problems as well as international conflicts.1 Thus the debate on birth control heralded by Sanger's visit to Japan went far beyond medical debates over the use of contraceptives: the introduction of birth control into interwar discussions about population growth provided a chance for Japanese intellectuals, activists, and bureaucrats to tackle a variety of pressing social issues, including poverty, employment, migration, and maternal and child health. As I will argue, despite their differing views on the primary purpose of birth control, Japanese birth control advocates reconfigured sexual reproduction and motherhood as central politico-economic problems. [End Page 3] Yamakawa Kikue (1890-1980) and Ishimoto Shizue (1897-2001, later Katō Shizue after marrying labor activist Katō Kanju in 1944) were feminist pioneers of the birth control movement and established the first birth control organization in Japan, the Japan Birth Control Research Group (Nihon Sanji Chōsetsu Kenkyūkai), in May 1922, led by Ishimoto. Ishimoto observed Sanger's birth control movement firsthand during her stay in New York between 1919 and 1920. After returning to Japan in September 1920, Ishimoto worked to introduce birth control to Japanese society (Ishimoto 1935 and 1984; Hopper 2004). Organization members included physician Kaji Tokijirō (1858-1930), socialist and baron Ishimoto Keikichi (1887-1951), socialist and Waseda University professor Abe Isoo (1865-1949), and labor activist Suzuki Bunji (1885-1946). The group published the magazine Shōkazoku (Small Family) along with a series of pamphlets promoting birth control. Although the organization disbanded less than a year later, the birth control movement continued throughout the interwar period as different actors—social reformists, proletarian activists, and feminists—agreed on the need to control population size and improve the "quality" of the Japanese population on eugenic grounds. I add to the growing body of scholarship in English, Japanese, and other world languages that has delved into the political dimensions of birth control to address questions of sexuality and reproduction within broader contexts of modern Japanese society. This article sheds new light on the history of birth control by arguing that the transnational discourse of problematizing populations was an integral part of Japanese feminists' advocacy for birth control. For example, Fujime Yuki (1997), in her comprehensive analysis of sex and gender systems in modern Japan, locates the prewar history of the birth control movement within long-term conflicts between state power and individual sexual freedom. Sabine Frühstück (2003), by focusing on social discourses and knowledge production about sexuality, broadens the notion of power to include the social control of sex and emphasizes intellectuals' roles in normalizing and regulating sexual behaviors such as artificial birth control. As opposed to these two researchers who address the question of control in the politics of birth control, Ogino Miho (2008) sheds light on Japanese citizens' responses to the political and social control of individuals' reproductive bodies. Ogino considers birth control as both a biopolitical technology and the sexual practice of individuals; she examines the often-overlooked fissures between discourse and practice in the politics of reproduction. Despite different understandings of power and agency in the politics of birth control, these scholars all agree with the underlying premise that social and scientific discourses on birth control exemplify the politics of women's bodies in modern Japan. While previous literature confines...

Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India by Asha Nadkarni

Reviewed by: Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India by Asha Nadkarni Crystal Parikh (bio) Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India, by Asha Nadkarni. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 264pp. $25.00 paper. ISBN: 978-0-8166-8993-4. As a conceptual framework and theoretical approach, transnational feminism has provided Asian American studies a welcome method by which to complicate any number of critical givens in the field: who counts as its subjects, what spaces fall under its purview, how social formations come into existence and how transformations in them take place, and how to rethink what we understand to be political resistance, subjection, and agency. And yet, like so many such critical discursive concepts, on its own and without being anchored in the particular histories and lifeworlds of women, transnational feminism is a rubric that can feel slippery and abstract, despite its very aim to the contrary. In other words, as a rejoinder to liberal feminism, a transnational feminist methodology cautions against positing any simplification and homogenization of women and women’s experience. The best of transnational feminist scholarship thus makes border crossings with great care, attentive to the specificities that render “woman” unviable as a singular, monolithic category of identity, but able to deploy gender and sexuality as powerful analytics for culture and society nonetheless. In her 2014 monograph, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India, Asha Nadkarni accomplishes this task with precision and clarity, and it is a book that makes important contributions to a number of fields beyond Asian American studies, including transnational American literary and cultural studies, feminist and gender studies, South Asian diaspora studies, and postcolonial studies. Nadkarni demonstrates how, in its both positive and negative aspects, what she calls “eugenic feminism” comes to center on modern national development and the reproduction of national populations, which hence become the object of intensely regulated social and political cultivation. [End Page 132] Building on the work of feminist critics who have demonstrated the extent to which Anglo-American feminisms mobilized racial and class differences, Nadkarni considers American feminist discourses—and reactionary responses to them by those such as Katherine Mayo—in relation to Indian nationalist feminism. She argues that both movements “launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation” and shows that, by locating biological reproduction as the key to both national progress and women’s rights, eugenic feminisms in the United States and in India take reproductive practices as central to women’s citizenship in each nation (5). Nadkarni further describes a “maternalist feminism” that homes in on women’s reproductive capacities as the locus for generating social and political agency (i.e., women as having “choice”) and implementing national(ist) objectives. Eugenic Feminism begins with the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the late nineteenth century and ends with the period of Emergency Rule under Indira Gandhi in the 1970s, with an epilogue that turns to current transnational reproductive technologies and market in the twenty-first century to consider how eugenics morphs into population control over the course of the twentieth century. In relating eugenics and population control (while also distinguishing the affective and political dimensions of each) by way of transnational analysis, Nadkarni further considers the global implications for “fit” and “unfit” forms of life as construed through imperial and postcolonial imaginaries of racial, gender, religious, and class difference. By way of Asian Americanist and transnational feminist perspectives, Nadkarni supplements postcolonial feminist studies that tend to focus upon either imperial feminist politics or patriarchal nationalism. As her discussions of the poet and activist Sarojini Naidu in chapters 2 and 3 and of Indira Gandhi in chapter 5 demonstrate, Indian feminism was itself quite active in producing visions of the nation and programs for its future (albeit neither of these women willingly adopted the moniker of “feminist”). On the other hand, Nadkarni’s analyses of Gilman and Mayo illustrate how the anxiety-ridden representations of Asia and “Mother India” bear upon conceptions of American national health, American women’s social and religious practices, and U.S. imperial ventures, immigration, and cultural...

Book Review: Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India

Book Review: Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India

"Our power to remodel civilization": the development of eugenic feminism in Alberta, 1909-1921.

In addition to being a prominent political figure in equal rights legislation, Emily Murphy was a vital contributor to programs which sought to improve the human race through forced sterilization. These negative aspects of this period in feminist history tend to be described as outside of the women's sphere, representing instead the patriarchal realm of men. However, both eugenics and the first-wave feminist ambitions for equal political rights were connected through an agrarian construction of "mothers of the race." As "mothers of the race," women in Alberta were responsible for the physical and moral betterment of the nation, and were directly engaged in concepts of intelligent motherhood, healthy childhood, and an overarching moral philosophy that was politically driven.

Reproducing Feminism in "Jasmine" and "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Reproducing Feminism in Jasmine and "The YellowWallpaper" Asha Nadkarni Charlotte Perkins Oilman's 1892 short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," has been an urtext of American feminism since its 1973 republication by the Feminist Press. Nonetheless, celebrations of Oilman's naturalist story too often ignore the extent to which the gender oppression it depicts is raced and classed. Published over a hundred years later, Bharati Mukher jee's 1989 novel Jasmine would seem to address the very issues that Gilman ignores.1 Instead of being driven mad by patriarchy, Jasmine's illegal immi grant protagonist escapes from India to the United States where she is allowed to take control of her destiny and "become an American." 2 While Gilman's tale of a privileged white woman's descent into madness may serve as an allegory for many Anglo-American Second Wave feminists, Jasmine seemingly offers a happier narrative of feminist development—one that does not end in madness and one that is ostensibly available to all.3 As anyone who has read Jasmine will realize, however, its happy ending is brought about through a largely uncritical narrative of assimilation. Just as Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" depends on a race- and class-specific account of patriarchal oppression, Jasmine models a form of US exception alism (as the protagonist's westward trajectory suggests) with an exclu sionary feminist twist; although Jasmine is successful in freeing herself of Feminist Studies38, no. 1 (Spring 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 218 Asha Nadkarm 219 the marks of difference that would trouble her accession into the United States, her experience does not apply to most immigrant women. Both works, moreover, display a distinctly racial logic. I will use the concept of "eugenic feminism" to describe this logic and argue that a coher ent feminist subjectivity in both "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Jasmine can only be forged by rejecting all racial and ethnic difference.4 For Gilman, the problem of creating a feminist self is a potentially maddening process of freeing that self from her color, one that is too easily betrayed by the messiness of biological and cultural reproduction itself. Likewise, to "become American" in Mukherjee's novel means employing a purifying process similar to that upon which Oilman's story turns. As such, eugenic feminism shapes an identity in negative terms, repeatedly returning to raced and classed others to define them as precisely what must be abjected in order for a "pure" feminist subject to emerge. In this essay I read Jasmine as a successor to Gilman's classic feminist tale in order to argue that even a "multicultural" feminist progress narrative can contain a eugenic impulse. Originally appearing in the New England Magazine in 1892, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is Gilman's semi-autobiographical story of taking Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's "rest cure" to alleviate her depression after the birth of her daugh ter.5 The story charts the narrator's growing madness and preoccupation with the wallpaper of her sickroom and ends with her identification with the woman she sees "crawling" (55) behind the "bars" (52) of the prison like pattern. Her ability to free the woman behind the wallpaper is made possible by her descent into a madness that by the end of the story is almost entirely complete. Early readings by Elaine Hedges, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Annette Kolodny, and Jean Kennard take up the story as a universal text of women's struggles against the patriarchal structures that constrict them, casting the narrator as a heroine who chooses to become mad rather than assume her proper place in the patriarchal order.6 Forbid den to write, the narrator's main task becomes one of interpretation — of trying to read the wallpaper—and it is precisely this process of interpreta tion that becomes both maddening and ultimately liberating. If the narra tor, as the universal feminist subject, can free herself through writing and interpretation, so too can US academic feminists engaged in similar tasks. 220 Asha Nadkarm In her groundbreaking analysis of race in "The Yellow Wallpaper" (also published in this journal), Susan Lanser takes issue with precisely this claim: she argues that such universalist readings create a feminist...

Growing a Race: Nellie L. McClung and the Fiction of Eugenic Feminism (review)

Growing a Race: Nellie L. McClung and the Fiction of Eugenic Feminism (review)

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

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.

The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact (review)

Reviewed by: The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact Bettina Tate Pedersen (bio) Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. vii+258, $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Angelique Richardson, Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter, and Chris Willis, former scholar and member of the editorial staff of Gender and History, have together edited a fascinating collection of articles that explore the range and complexity of the New Woman icon emerging in the 1890s. The fourteen essays begin with Talia Schaffer's "'Nothing but Foolscap and Ink': Inventing the New Woman," which delineates the broad tension between the media caricature of the New Woman as "the unsexed, terrifying, violent Amazon ready to overturn the world" (39) and real New Women figures. In addressing questions of why such a caricature appeared, who found it useful, and what sort of negotiations progressive feminist women made around the label, Schaffer provides an effective foundation for the more particular investigations that follow. Willis's essay distinguishes between commercial and polemical New Woman fiction, noting that the less didactic commercial species reached a wider audience than the polemical (written by recognized New Women authors), but also depicted heroines capitulating to marriage in the end. Ann Heilmann and Laura Marcus study the relationship between real and fictive New Women and hysteria, emerging psychoanalysis, and daydreaming. Heilmann examines an English, American, and German New Woman response (from Sarah Grand, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Bertha Pappenheim respectively) to the medical establishment's categorization of hysteria, while Marcus argues that New Women fiction represented both feminism as external and hysteria/daydreaming as internal manifestations of female rebellion. Sarah Wintle explores the technological influences of the bicycle and automobile, and Sally Ledger the aesthetic influences of Ibsen's theatre (via George Bernard Shaw) on the New Woman and the shape of British Victorian feminism. Essays by Angelique Richardson, Matthew Beaumont, Gail Cunningham, Regina Gagnier, Ann Ardis, Lesley Hall, Rebecca Stott, and Carolyn Burdett elucidate important tensions informing constructions of the New Woman. Richardson traces the opposition between essentialism in biological determinism and social construction in utopian possibilities, with particular focus on Mona Caird, who offered a radical feminist resistance to eugenic feminism. Beaumont highlights the fin de siècle's "concern with post-capitalist or post-patriarchal social intercourse" (213) and probes the relationship between feminism and utopianism in a representative utopian novel by Elizabeth Corbett. Cunningham's "'He-Notes': Reconstructing Masculinity" examines New Womanhood and masculinity [End Page 429] in texts by George Egerton and Ménie Murial Dowie to find texts that did not offer the usual erasure or surrender of New Woman characters but instead treated males/masculinity as something to be accepted or rejected by the New Woman herself. Gagnier revisits the New Womanhood versus Male Decadence binary using an "optic of difference and tension rather than regret" (239) to elucidate the tension between "productive bodies" / "productivist aesthetics" and "pleasured bodies" / "hedonics" (241); whereas Ardis scrutinizes whether or not the New Hellenism – which did so much to legitimize and elevate male love – actually "enable[d] or discredit[ted] female intellectuality" (108). Hall recuperates a history of Stella Brown, less important in regard to suffrage than to radical feminism focused on female sexuality and sexual desire and a woman's right to control her own sexuality by refusing maternity. Stott and Burdett explore the complementary and contradictory relationships between the discourses of colonization and feminism with special attention to works of Olive Schreiner. Most essays in the collection give some attention to the periodical press, either as source of primary texts, or for contemporary commentary upon those primary texts or as a medium for shaping the popular cultural responses to the New Woman. However, Stott, Beaumont, Hall, Richardson, and Cunningham appear to draw on periodicals most deeply. The overall literary and historical success of Richardson and Willis's volume renders it a "must have" for any academic library; the introduction alone is invaluable for anyone studying New Woman fiction or fin de siècle feminism. By and large the essays combine complex reading and insight with accessible prose. As...

Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Regeneration Narratives

"Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Regeneration Narratives" historicizes and theorizes the complexities of fin-de-siecle "women's literature"--fiction by and about women that highlights and explores the social relations of gender. Attending especially to the involvement of this literature in the textual mediation of scientific discourse, I ask: if some of the greatest anxieties over cultural progress or degeneration in this period were organized around theories of heredity, what kinds of pressures, urgencies, or appeals were placed on motherhood? How did women-authored narratives react to or participate in the generation of these appeals? Charlotte Perkins Gilman's fiction exemplifies a mode of reaction and participation I call "eugenic feminism": the use of eugenics for a feminist agenda articulated on behalf of perceived socio-sexual problems. Gilman deploys this agenda to construct "regeneration narratives" that respond to fears of degeneration by foregrounding the cultural primacy of women and their reproductive status. In so doing, she helped instantiate and inform a new version of liberal humanism in which the mother acts as ideal civic progenitor. By representing eugenic ideology as the source of this ideal, she racializes the language of feminism. Thus her regulatory fictions of sexual responsibility operate as both fantasies of white female political agency and norms that manage female sexuality.

The Eugenization of Love: Sarah Grand and the Morality of Genealogy

The Eugenization of Love: Sarah Grand and the Morality of Genealogy Angelique Richardson* (bio) What you get married for if you don’t want children? — T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (2: 164) The term “New Woman,” which the novelist and social purist Sarah Grand (1854–1943) claimed to have invented in 1894,1 covers a variety of forms of femininity which were brought to public attention in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The extent to which the New Woman was a social reality was fiercely debated in the periodical press, but she entered the world of fiction with considerable impact. Between 1883 and 1900 over a hundred novels were written by or about her (Ardis, New Women 4). As one piqued commentator declared in the Westminster Review, “it is not possible to ride by road or rail, to read a review, a magazine or a newspaper, without being continually reminded of the subject which lady-writers love to call the Woman Question.” He wondered, too, about “women’s pictures, women’s plays, women’s books. What is it that makes them temporarily so successful, and eternally so wanting?” (Sykes 396–97). In the words of W. T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, “the novel of the Modern Woman is one of the most notable and significant features of the fiction of the day. The Modern Woman novel is not merely a novel written about women, but it is a novel written by a woman about women from the standpoint of woman” (64). For the anti-feminist Eliza Lynn Linton, the New Woman was anti-social; for the publisher and essayist Arthur Waugh, the undoing of aesthetics; for Sarah Grand, she was (or ought to be) a model of civic virtue. What these competing definitions of the New Woman have in common is her apparent newness, her autonomy and her determination to set her own agenda in developing an alternative vision of the future. Silenced for the best part of the twentieth century, New Woman voices have formed the focus of increasing scholarly debate in [End Page 227] the last two decades, a focus which has seen them acclaimed by many as unadulteratedly feminist. Many of these critical appraisals, characterized by current anti-essentialist thinking, present New Woman texts as aesthetically and politically radical.2 In what follows I will locate the New Woman more securely in her historical context, arguing in particular that she had her own agenda of eugenic feminism, the central goal of which was the construction of civic motherhood.3 In the only scholarly study to date devoted to Grand’s work, Teresa Mangum identifies, importantly, a eugenic element in her penultimate novel, Adnam’s Orchard (1912). However, she sees Grand as ultimately rejecting eugenics, and argues that the New Woman forced her readers “to question the biological essentialism at the heart of ideal womanhood” (Married 11, 2). I will argue, instead, that Grand’s enthusiasm for eugenics perpetuates biological essentialism in its most powerful form. Biological determinism was central to the social and political agenda of a number of New Women writers as they situated themselves in the cross fire of the debates on national health and heredity.4 Positioned among social purists, Social Darwinists, and eugenists, these writers were concerned less with examining the unstable, socially constructed nature of selfhood and the body, than with grounding both the body and sex roles in the flesh and blood of evolutionary narrative. In fiction, the parts women could play in incubating a fit nation were popularized and diversified through plot and character. While novels such as Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) do explore the ways in which sexual difference is exaggerated by processes of culture, they ultimately represent sex as fixed, and character as largely determined by heredity. Grand’s perception of what the New Woman ought to be is, thus, at odds with the sexually indeterminate version favored by recent criticism. In an interview in 1900, Grand expressed her regret at being associated with “the vulgar creature who now passes for the approved type of new woman” (Forbes 883). She emphasized that she had envisaged “a very different being...