Eugenics and Sexuality
In this new climate of empirical investigation and medical authority, Dickinson began his research into sexuality, contraception, and women's lives. He was fundamentally influenced by the shift in medical perspective toward scientific investigation. Another concurrent influence on his investigation into the sexual life was eugenics. Eugenic theory gave him expanded criteria with which he could judge the validity of sexual acts. It offered a language in which moral issues, societal fears, and racism could be scientifically articulated. Dickinson felt these problems should be within the scope of medicine.
The first few decades of the twentieth century saw the expansion of the eugenics movement in the United States. In the pre-World War I period, new ideas of heredity and the constitutional nature of personality spread from England to America. Initially, American eugenicists joined the British organization, the Eugenics Education Society, which was established in 1907. In 1923 an organization was brought into being in the United States, the American Eugenics Society. It quickly expanded and had twenty-eight state committees. The actual numbers of members were relatively small but they had many prominent people in their ranks. Doctors, clergy, university academics, and others who held respected positions in society were attracted to the American Eugenics Society. Dickinson himself was a member of the advisory council. Professionals were attracted to the eugenics movement as they were to other social reform campaigns.36
Eugenics, in part was popular because of its ability to connect with the concerns embedded in the social purity movement. Such groups saw the unraveling of society as the result of moral decay. They wanted to return society to what they thought was a more traditional state. Social purity organizations were concerned with preserving the integrity of a bourgeois family which symbolized the purity of the past. Much of the social purity discourse dealt with the control of sexuality, particularly male sexuality and its relationship to prostitution and temperance.37 Eugenics had an added appeal to social reformers even though its views were not always in line with conservative social purity organizations. It offered a scientific way to solve social problems to which other reform programs had no recourse. Anxieties about the decline in birth rate in middle and upper-class families, the loss of morality, and the impact of waves of immigration were all addressed by eugenic theory.38
Eugenic ideas began to filter into popular culture in the second two decades of the twentieth century. Magazines and newspapers published articles expressing eugenic opinions. "Fitter Families" fairs celebrated the superiority of eugenically fit families. American culture embraced eugenics as a new brand of science that had potential to make a difference for "everyone". Eugenics was part of the general atmosphere of social reform which was sweeping America.39
The early twentieth century was marked by its emphasis on reforming society and this extended to new spheres for governmental intervention. Enlightened reform government during this time relied on the advice of scientific experts. Many of these experts drawn upon were eugenicists. New laws were drawn up using eugenic data as their basis. At the national level, laws were enacted to curtail immigration of non-whites and Southern and Eastern Europeans. Eugenic legislation was most successful at the state level. Such laws included restrictions on marriages of "drunkards," "the insane," "the mentally deficient," and persons who carried a "transmissible disease". Some state laws allowed the involuntary sterilization of "defectives" and sometimes criminals. Though this legislation was not uniform, it was surprisingly widespread.40
Increasingly, social deviants such as criminals, homosexuals, alcoholics, and "the feebleminded" were labeled as biologically degenerate "types" as a result of the new eugenic perspective. These ideas marked the poor among other groups and blamed them for their situation, instead of locating responsibility in the social stratification brought about by the mode of production. Eugenics was coextensive with the bourgeois management of the "masses" in American capitalism. The increasingly surveilled behavior of "degenerates" was understood as a product of poor breeding and inherent biological inferiority. Although environmental causes were still sought to explain why people transgressed, these reasons were secondary to hereditary factors. Transgressing laws or taboos was no longer a simple question of the morally weak giving in to vice and crime; transgression was explained, rather, as the result of proclivities inherent to the flesh. These marginalized people exemplified a supposed racial degeneration that many in the middle and upper classes feared was happening in the United States.41 (see figure 1 and 2)
-- Figure 1: "The sins of the parents are visited upon the children- syphilitic father and blind son."
-- Figure 2: Eugenic diagram describing the potential of environmental factors in male development
The eugenics movement in America advocated both positive and negative ways of improving the stock. Many argued for a scientifically directed propagation of the human race, but disagreed about its exact implementation.43 The difference between positive and negative eugenic methods was explained clearly in lay person terms in the American Eugenic Society tract, Tomorrow's Children (1935).
Negative or restrictive eugenics is the application of social measures to the problem of limiting the number of children in families where genetic principles enable us to predict an undesirable inheritance with a high degree of probability, and where environmental conditions indicate that the training will be poor. . . . Positive or constructive eugenics is the application of social measures to increasing the number of children in families where the probability of a desirable inheritance and good training is strongly indicated.44
Both forms of eugenics involved the management of reproduction through some standard of genetic fitness. A scientific language is adopted in this passage which conceals the race and class-based assumptions behind the empirically-based presumptions. Bourgeois norms were thus naturalized. Positive eugenics involved the promotion of reproduction in families who were both constitutionally and socially fit. Negative eugenics involved limiting the birth of the socially undesirable. The more radical forms of the latter ranged from involuntary sterilization, to other less invasive forms of birth control, limitation of marriages, and/or segregation of degenerate types.45
The language used to discuss those who were labeled unfit was both reductionistic and dehumanizing. In articulating the merits of positive or negative eugenics, Huntington used an analogy between human reproduction and plant propagation.
The case is like that of seeds in a garden. What we want is good seed from which to get not only good flowers and vegetables, but more good seed for next season. The only way to be sure of such seed is to have plenty of good plants and prevent poor varieties from growing with good ones.46
The garden analogy used in this passage made the "problem" of heredity seem quite simple to the reader. In order for the progress of humankind to continue, a eugenic gardener must take matters into "his" own hands. Natural selection and human evolution became the tools of social engineering for the eugenicist. The extreme measures that would have had to be undertaken would equate to mass sterilization and segregation of "undesirables". American eugenics goals were ideologically linked with racial policies that the Nazi party would implement once in power. The metaphor of the garden reduced human destiny only to the preservation and enhancement of the germ plasm. During the middle and late 1930s, the linkage of American eugenics with German fascism eventually lead to its most serious criticism and vehement cultural disavowal.47
Eugenics was intrinsically linked with race hygiene in the cultural sphere. Eugenic assumptions about who were "undesirable" were tied to racially infused, class-based biases. Members of the eugenics movement claimed the term "race hygiene" for themselves. In Tomorrow's Children, Huntington sought to answer the question why eugenics sometimes was called race hygiene. His reply was, "because it will do for the race what personal hygiene does for the individual."48 He went on to suggest that those defined by eugenic investigation as "defectives" were an insidious disease that posed a threat to America's future.49
This medicalized metaphor of the social problem of "defectives" drew upon notions of purity and cleanliness. The social body was made dirty by the presence of those constructed as less than pure. Mainline American eugenics was a program to clean the social body through the elimination of those who transgressed the mores of the polite society and could not adequately compete in the marketplace. Social misfits, physical misshapes, and those who lived in squalor were all indicted in this discourse. Their births were seen as careless mistakes by those in the eugenics movement. Eugenics promised to prevent the birth of "degenerates" so the "unfit" could not hamper the progress of bourgeois society.
The discourse of eugenics put the body at the forefront of public discourse. Within individual bodies existed the dangers of social degeneration and the promises of a new society free from deviance and disorder. This was a historical moment that allowed a gynecologist like Dickinson the discursive authority to research into subjects that were socially contested: birth control and sexuality. Taking an approach similar to what Ellis had done previously in England, Dickinson could turn to sexological research and attempt to reorient gynecology to his perspective.
The first few decades of the twentieth century saw the expansion of the eugenics movement in the United States. In the pre-World War I period, new ideas of heredity and the constitutional nature of personality spread from England to America. Initially, American eugenicists joined the British organization, the Eugenics Education Society, which was established in 1907. In 1923 an organization was brought into being in the United States, the American Eugenics Society. It quickly expanded and had twenty-eight state committees. The actual numbers of members were relatively small but they had many prominent people in their ranks. Doctors, clergy, university academics, and others who held respected positions in society were attracted to the American Eugenics Society. Dickinson himself was a member of the advisory council. Professionals were attracted to the eugenics movement as they were to other social reform campaigns.36
Eugenics, in part was popular because of its ability to connect with the concerns embedded in the social purity movement. Such groups saw the unraveling of society as the result of moral decay. They wanted to return society to what they thought was a more traditional state. Social purity organizations were concerned with preserving the integrity of a bourgeois family which symbolized the purity of the past. Much of the social purity discourse dealt with the control of sexuality, particularly male sexuality and its relationship to prostitution and temperance.37 Eugenics had an added appeal to social reformers even though its views were not always in line with conservative social purity organizations. It offered a scientific way to solve social problems to which other reform programs had no recourse. Anxieties about the decline in birth rate in middle and upper-class families, the loss of morality, and the impact of waves of immigration were all addressed by eugenic theory.38
Eugenic ideas began to filter into popular culture in the second two decades of the twentieth century. Magazines and newspapers published articles expressing eugenic opinions. "Fitter Families" fairs celebrated the superiority of eugenically fit families. American culture embraced eugenics as a new brand of science that had potential to make a difference for "everyone". Eugenics was part of the general atmosphere of social reform which was sweeping America.39
The early twentieth century was marked by its emphasis on reforming society and this extended to new spheres for governmental intervention. Enlightened reform government during this time relied on the advice of scientific experts. Many of these experts drawn upon were eugenicists. New laws were drawn up using eugenic data as their basis. At the national level, laws were enacted to curtail immigration of non-whites and Southern and Eastern Europeans. Eugenic legislation was most successful at the state level. Such laws included restrictions on marriages of "drunkards," "the insane," "the mentally deficient," and persons who carried a "transmissible disease". Some state laws allowed the involuntary sterilization of "defectives" and sometimes criminals. Though this legislation was not uniform, it was surprisingly widespread.40
Increasingly, social deviants such as criminals, homosexuals, alcoholics, and "the feebleminded" were labeled as biologically degenerate "types" as a result of the new eugenic perspective. These ideas marked the poor among other groups and blamed them for their situation, instead of locating responsibility in the social stratification brought about by the mode of production. Eugenics was coextensive with the bourgeois management of the "masses" in American capitalism. The increasingly surveilled behavior of "degenerates" was understood as a product of poor breeding and inherent biological inferiority. Although environmental causes were still sought to explain why people transgressed, these reasons were secondary to hereditary factors. Transgressing laws or taboos was no longer a simple question of the morally weak giving in to vice and crime; transgression was explained, rather, as the result of proclivities inherent to the flesh. These marginalized people exemplified a supposed racial degeneration that many in the middle and upper classes feared was happening in the United States.41 (see figure 1 and 2)
-- Figure 1: "The sins of the parents are visited upon the children- syphilitic father and blind son."
-- Figure 2: Eugenic diagram describing the potential of environmental factors in male development
The eugenics movement in America advocated both positive and negative ways of improving the stock. Many argued for a scientifically directed propagation of the human race, but disagreed about its exact implementation.43 The difference between positive and negative eugenic methods was explained clearly in lay person terms in the American Eugenic Society tract, Tomorrow's Children (1935).
Negative or restrictive eugenics is the application of social measures to the problem of limiting the number of children in families where genetic principles enable us to predict an undesirable inheritance with a high degree of probability, and where environmental conditions indicate that the training will be poor. . . . Positive or constructive eugenics is the application of social measures to increasing the number of children in families where the probability of a desirable inheritance and good training is strongly indicated.44
Both forms of eugenics involved the management of reproduction through some standard of genetic fitness. A scientific language is adopted in this passage which conceals the race and class-based assumptions behind the empirically-based presumptions. Bourgeois norms were thus naturalized. Positive eugenics involved the promotion of reproduction in families who were both constitutionally and socially fit. Negative eugenics involved limiting the birth of the socially undesirable. The more radical forms of the latter ranged from involuntary sterilization, to other less invasive forms of birth control, limitation of marriages, and/or segregation of degenerate types.45
The language used to discuss those who were labeled unfit was both reductionistic and dehumanizing. In articulating the merits of positive or negative eugenics, Huntington used an analogy between human reproduction and plant propagation.
The case is like that of seeds in a garden. What we want is good seed from which to get not only good flowers and vegetables, but more good seed for next season. The only way to be sure of such seed is to have plenty of good plants and prevent poor varieties from growing with good ones.46
The garden analogy used in this passage made the "problem" of heredity seem quite simple to the reader. In order for the progress of humankind to continue, a eugenic gardener must take matters into "his" own hands. Natural selection and human evolution became the tools of social engineering for the eugenicist. The extreme measures that would have had to be undertaken would equate to mass sterilization and segregation of "undesirables". American eugenics goals were ideologically linked with racial policies that the Nazi party would implement once in power. The metaphor of the garden reduced human destiny only to the preservation and enhancement of the germ plasm. During the middle and late 1930s, the linkage of American eugenics with German fascism eventually lead to its most serious criticism and vehement cultural disavowal.47
Eugenics was intrinsically linked with race hygiene in the cultural sphere. Eugenic assumptions about who were "undesirable" were tied to racially infused, class-based biases. Members of the eugenics movement claimed the term "race hygiene" for themselves. In Tomorrow's Children, Huntington sought to answer the question why eugenics sometimes was called race hygiene. His reply was, "because it will do for the race what personal hygiene does for the individual."48 He went on to suggest that those defined by eugenic investigation as "defectives" were an insidious disease that posed a threat to America's future.49
This medicalized metaphor of the social problem of "defectives" drew upon notions of purity and cleanliness. The social body was made dirty by the presence of those constructed as less than pure. Mainline American eugenics was a program to clean the social body through the elimination of those who transgressed the mores of the polite society and could not adequately compete in the marketplace. Social misfits, physical misshapes, and those who lived in squalor were all indicted in this discourse. Their births were seen as careless mistakes by those in the eugenics movement. Eugenics promised to prevent the birth of "degenerates" so the "unfit" could not hamper the progress of bourgeois society.
The discourse of eugenics put the body at the forefront of public discourse. Within individual bodies existed the dangers of social degeneration and the promises of a new society free from deviance and disorder. This was a historical moment that allowed a gynecologist like Dickinson the discursive authority to research into subjects that were socially contested: birth control and sexuality. Taking an approach similar to what Ellis had done previously in England, Dickinson could turn to sexological research and attempt to reorient gynecology to his perspective.
posted by Matthew at 8:01 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home