Eugenics In Britain Research Articles

The Racial Imperatives of Sex: birth control and eugenics in Britain, the United States and Australia in the interwar years

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.

Watching the ‘Eugenic Experiment’ Unfold: The Mixed Views of British Eugenicists Toward Nazi Germany in the Early 1930s

Historians of the eugenics movement have long been ambivalent in their examination of the links between British hereditary researchers and Nazi Germany. While there is now a clear consensus that American eugenics provided significant material and ideological support for the Germans, the evidence remains less clear in the British case where comparatively few figures openly supported the Nazi regime and the left-wing critique of eugenics remained particularly strong. After the Second World War British eugenicists had to push back against the accusation that their science was intrinsically dictatorial or totalitarian and, as a result, many of their early perceptions of the Nazis were ignored or rationalised away. Further, historians in recent years have focused more directly on the social reformist elements of eugenics, discussing the links between hereditary science and the birth control and feminist movements in addition to others. While undoubtedly making valuable contributions to the scholarly understanding of the eugenic milieu in the interwar years, these studies have neglected to recontextualize the sentiments of British eugenicists who did indeed view the Nazi government positively in the early years of the 1930s. This article argues that there was a significant, though not numerically sizable, faction in the British eugenics movement, though mostly outside the Eugenics Society itself, in the early 1930s that viewed the Nazi Germany as an admirable state for its implementation of eugenic principles. One of these figures was later interned by his own government for being too closely aligned with the German regime, though he argued that this affinity was driven by the quest for scientific truth rather than politics. Eugenics in Britain thus contained a greater diversity of views toward Germany than scholars have previously assumed, warranting more research into the individuals and organizations harbouring these views.

BOOK REVIEW: Mark Jackson.THE BORDERLAND OF IMBECILITY: MEDICINE, SOCIETY AND THE FABRICATION OF THE FEEBLE MIND IN LATE VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN ENGLAND. pp. x + 273. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.

In Edwardian England eugenics was very topical. Guests at polite London dinner parties discussed the threat of the "unfit" and the virtues of the "lethal chamber." In Whitehall, Home Secretaries pondered the merits of sterilisation of "mental defectives" and by 1908 the massive Royal Commission into the Feeble-Minded, designed to answer questions about the nature of defectiveness and how to deal with this "threat," was under way. Given the volume of debate, and the important social policies that resulted from these deliberations, the relative lack of attention to the history of eugenics in Britain is surprising. There is a rich corpus of good articles, theses and chapters, and pioneering work by historians such as G. R. Searle, but in comparison to North America, where the historiography on eugenics is extensive, the volume of British work looks remarkably thin. Perhaps this state of affairs reflects the difference between a culture where sterilisation laws were enacted, and one where the campaign for sterilisation largely failed. Nevertheless why Britain preferred segregation to sterilisation is an important question, one that stands to tell us much about the nature of British culture and politics.

The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (review)

In Edwardian England eugenics was very topical. Guests at polite London dinner parties discussed the threat of the "unfit" and the virtues of the "lethal chamber." In Whitehall, Home Secretaries pondered the merits of sterilisation of "mental defectives" and by 1908 the massive Royal Commission into the Feeble-Minded, designed to answer questions about the nature of defectiveness and how to deal with this "threat," was under way. Given the volume of debate, and the important social policies that resulted from these deliberations, the relative lack of attention to the history of eugenics in Britain is surprising. There is a rich corpus of good articles, theses and chapters, and pioneering work by historians such as G. R. Searle, but in comparison to North America, where the historiography on eugenics is extensive, the volume of British work looks remarkably thin. Perhaps this state of affairs reflects the difference between a culture where sterilisation laws were enacted, and one where the campaign for sterilisation largely failed. Nevertheless why Britain preferred segregation to sterilisation is an important question, one that stands to tell us much about the nature of British culture and politics.

Ideas of heredity, reproduction and eugenics in Britain, 1800–1875

In this paper I begin by arguing that there are significant intellectual and normative continuities between pre-Victorian hereditarianism and later Victorian eugenical ideologies. Notions of mental heredity and of the dangers of transmitting hereditary ‘taints’ were already serious concerns among medical practitioners and laymen in the early nineteenth century. I then show how the Victorian period witnessed an increasing tendency for these traditional concerns about hereditary transmission and the integrity of bloodlines to be projected onto the level of national health. Tracing the gradual emergence of eugenical thought, I also highlight some of the more fundamental social, political and intellectual factors that promoted this predilection for extrapolating from the individual lineage to the nation and race. In doing so I argue that fully fledged eugenical thought was always unlikely to emerge prior to the early Victorian period. However, I am also able to show that Francis Galton's 1865 eugenical proposals were far from innovative and that identifying him as the ‘father’ of the eugenics movement is highly misleading.

Race in British Eugenics

The dominant historiographical view of eugenics in Britain is that it was a middle-class protest movement that found in early genetic science a justification for its objections to paying taxes to aid the poor. Often, this position is contrasted with a ‘harder’, blood-and-soil, continental type of eugenics, one that ended in genocide. In this article Stone does not dispute the class-based nature of British eugenics, but shows that, among all kinds of eugenicists, this class issue was inseparable from a racially motivated world view. ‘Race’, in this reading, was more than simply a synonym for ‘nation’, for already by the Edwardian period there was a widely accepted racial hierarchy. If this was not always referred to, it was because it was taken for granted. Hence the view of British eugenics that sees it as mildly threatening but basically embarrassing needs to be adjusted so that its full, sinister implications can be seen.

Women and eugenics in Britain: The case of Mary Scharlieb, Elizabeth Sloan Chesser, and Stella Browne

Existing literature on eugenics only touches briefly upon the role played by women. This article sets out to examine the reason for the high participation of women in the British eugenics movement by focusing on the role of three individuals in the early part of the twentieth century. It concludes that an important objective of women in eugenics was the 'feminization' of its social agenda.

Eugenics and politics in Britain in the 1930s.

Summary This paper discusses the surprising resurgence in the fortunes of the British eugenics movement in the 1930s. It is argued that although mass unemployment may in the long run have discredited that version of eugenics in which social dependence and destitution were attributed to genetic defect, in the short run the Depression was often perceived as a vindication of the eugenical creed. In particular, the attempt to reduce the fertility of the unemployed by popularising birth control techniques, and the voluntary sterilization campaign aimed at preventing the propagation of defectives from the so-called Social Problem Group, satisfied the urge felt by many conservative members from the professional classes to respond creatively to the country's crisis, without endangering existing social and economic institutions. It is also shown that not until 1938 did events in Germany cause substantial damage to the cause of eugenics in Britain. In fact, the ‘German experiment’ was actually greeted with approval...

The history of eugenics: a bibliographical review.

Summary The literature about the history of eugenics in Britain and the U.S.A. is reviewed. The review is prefaced by a brief outline of the origins of eugenics in Britain. The material surveyed is grouped according to whether it deals with eugenics generally, or with the relationships between eugenics and particular biological or social sciences, or with other subjects to which the history of eugenics is relevant. The review concludes with remarks about the significance of the subject and some suggestions for future research.

Eugenics in Britain.

part of this century is an important example of the relationship between scientific ideas and the interests and purposes of social groups. The eugenists possessed a social theory, and a set of social policies, which claimed scientific foundation. Social position, they argued, was largely the result of individual qualities such as mental ability, predisposition to sickness or health, or moral tendency. These qualities were inherited, and thus a rough equation could be drawn between social standing and hereditary worth. On this basis a programme of social action to improve the quality of the population was put forward. Central to this was the alteration of the relative birth-rate (or survival rate) of the 'fit' and 'unfit'. Those with good hereditary qualities should marry with care and have large numbers of children (this came to be called positive eugenics), while those with hereditary disabilities should be discouraged from parenthood (negative eugenics). The eugenists supported schemes of social reform which would, either directly or indirectly, have this effect, while condemning policies which appeared to encourage procreation of the 'unfit'. Thus, they sought to raise the fertility of some groups in society (generally those of higher social status) and lower that of others (those of lowest status). Eugenics was backed by arguments based on commonsense and medical knowledge of heredity, Darwinian biology and, increasingly, specialized scientific research. While largely relying on pre-existing