MP: An Online Feminist Journal Spring 2013: Vol.4, Issue 1
Women ‘Waking Up’ and Moving the Mountain;
The Feminist Eugenics of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
By Susan Rensing
The 1910s were a period of tremendous visibility of eugenic ideas throughout the United States, in large part because of Progressive Era enthusiasm for scientific solutions to social problems. Americans were concerned with how to improve the hereditary quality of the human race and eugenics was the science dedicated to pursuing that goal.Parallel to this expansion of eugenics in the public sphere was a revitalization of the women's movement that began to be called ‘feminism.’ Both eugenics and feminism were being constructed and expanded in the 1910s, and the interaction between the two ideologies is the focus of this paper. On the one hand, eugenicists attempted to use eugenics to shape the scope of feminism, and limit the roles of women to motherhood and breeding for racial betterment, what the British doctor and widely read science writer Caleb Saleeby termed “eugenic feminism.”
On the other hand, “the foremost American female feminist” during this period, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, argued that the new age of women’s equality would shape eugenics, not the other way around, and articulated a feminist eugenics that separated breeding from motherhood
Feminist eugenics, as Gilman envisioned it, constrained the choices available to men by subverting their role as sexual selectors, taking away their economic power in marriage,and targeting the sexual double standard.
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