Abstract
An editorial in the March 1911 issue of American Breeder’s Magazine,1 a journal pioneering research in the new science of heredity and eugenics, addressed the issue of the confluence of the newly emerging feminist movement and eugenics. It praised the activity of women geared toward transforming their position in the public sphere and viewed it as “a part of evolution in the adjustment of women in the vocations.”2 It endorsed the female revolt against “such discriminations as a lower scale of wage for the same service as given to men, the prohibition of the right of the ballot, the ownership of too large a proportion of the property by men and unequal rights at law.”3 The basis of the support sprang from the conviction that “motherhood is worthy of larger rewards”4 and thus the female reproductive role should be given its due recognition in the public sphere as well. The editorial bewailed social practices and discourses that diminished the potential of women, stifled their development and led them to curb their procreation:
The ideals of our time—too often promulgated by our schools—which should serve future generations as well as present generations, have led our women to disregard to too great extent social values, racial duties, and racial opportunities … The philosophy of our times has rather encouraged bright women to choose a successful line of employment, or to repose in the “fine art of idleness” in parental houses, or to lead lives of married sterility. Those able financially, physically, and morally to produce the best children so as to bring up racial average have been rather content that their sisters with less of material wealth, often not strong physically, and sometimes with lower moral ideals should produce a larger percentage of youth. It would seem that the relatively lower birthrate in the families of the more effective persons, as compared with the higher birthrate of those whose average efficiency is lower than the normal, is on the whole carrying the network of descent, of the nation as a whole, to lower rather than to higher levels.5
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Notes
Cited in D. J. Kevles (2004), In the Name of Eugenia: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 90.
See B. W. Capo (2007), Textual Contraception: Birth Control and Modern American Fiction (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press);
A. Franks (2005), Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: the Control of Female Fertility (Jefferson: McFarland & Company); N. Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 137–158;
D. K. Pickens (1968), Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University), 69–85.
M. Sanger (2004), The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger (Mineola: Dover Publications), 375.
See Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics; and E. Black (2003), War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press).
On the history of the publication of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” see C. Perkins Gilman (2006), The Yellow Wallpaper, in S. St. Jean (ed.), The Yellow Wallpaper: A Dual Text Critical Edition (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press);
H. Lefkovitz Horovitz (2010), Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of the “Yellow Wallpaper” (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
J. Bates Dock (ed.) (1998), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook (University Park: The Penn State University Press).
In her letter to Mrs. Cooper of February 1, 1896, Gilman brags of Lester Ward’s admiration for her work. Cited in D. D. Knight and J. S. Tuttle (eds.) (2009), The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press), 71.
Scharnhorst emphasizes that “Charlotte Perkins Gilman was emphatically not a social Darwinist in the normal sense of the phrase.” G. Scharnhorst (2003), “The Intellectual Context of Herland: The Social Theories of Lester Ward,” in D. D. Knight and C.J. Davis (eds.), Approaches to Teaching Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Herland (New York: The Modern Language Association of America), 118–124; see p. 118 for the quotation.
C. Perkins Gilman (1990), The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press), 182.
For a discussion of a relationship between Ward and Gilman, see J. A. Allen (2004), “‘The Overthrow’ of Gynaecocentric Culture: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Lester Frank Ward,” in C. J. Davis and D. D. Knight (eds.) Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press);
C. J. Davis (2003), “His and Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Re-presents Lester F. Ward,” in L. A. Cuddy and C. M. Roche (eds.), Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880–1940: Essays on Ideology Conflict and Complicity (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press);
S. M. Gilbert and S. Gubar (1999), “Fecundate! Discriminate! Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Theologizing of Maternity,” in J. Rudd and V. Gough (eds.), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press);
and also A. Palmeri (1983), “Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Forerunner of a Feminist Social Science,” in S. Harding and M. B. Hintikka (eds.), Discovering Reality; Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel).
C. Perkins Gilman (1997), With Her in Our Land (Westport: Greenwood Press), 367.
Preface to C. P. Gilman (2001), The Man Made World (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books).
L. Ward (1906), Applied Sociology (New York: Ginn and Company), 296.
See L. Ward (1913), “Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics,” The American Journal of Sociology, XVIII, 6 (May), 737–747.
Due to his critique, Ward has been identified as a liberal eugenicist, who built on the work of Caleeby and MacBride. See M. A. Hasian, Jr. (1996), The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press). Some historians such as Donald K. Pickens went as far as to deny Ward’s support for eugenics due to his rejection of a belief in radical hereditarianism.
See D. K. Pickens (1968), Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University).
C. Farley Kessler (1995), Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Her Progress toward Utopia with Selected Writings (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press).
See L. L. Lovett (2007), Conceiving the Future: Reproduction, and the Family in the United States (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press).
See R. R. Rentoul (1906), Race Culture; or, Race Suicide? A Plea for the Unborn (London: Walter Scott Publishing Co.).
E. A. Ross (1901), “The Cause of Race Superiority,” an Address at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of the Political and Social Science, Annals of the American Academy of the Political and Social Science, 18 (July), 67–89.
T. Roosevelt (1907), “A Letter from President Roosevelt on Race Suicide,” American Monthly Review of Reviews, 35, 550–551.
E. A. Ross (1913), The Old World and the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (New York: The Century Co).
See C. J. Davis (2010), Charlotte Perkins Oilman: A Biography (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
Cited in J. Wieberg (1972), Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin), 55.
Cited in S. H. McMahon (1999), Social Control and Public Intellect: The legacy of Edward A. Ross (New Brunswick: Transaction), 125.
See N. G. Castillo (2008), “Edward Alsworth Ross: An Intellectual Shift from Biological Eugenics to Sociological Racial Betterment.” BA thesis, http://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/355l4, date accessed September 12, 2014.
See also E. A. Ross (1921), “Menace of Migrating Menace,” Century 102 (May), 131–135;
E. A. Ross (1922), The Social Trend (New York: Century Co), 16;
E. A. Ross (1926), “With the Population Mystics,” Social Forum, 5, 1 (September), 32–36.
D. D. Knight (1994), “Introduction,” to C. Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Selected Stories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Newark: University of Delaware Press), 29.
T. Peyser (1998), Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American literary Realism (Durham: Duke University Press), 68.
A.J. Lane (1990), To Her Land and Beyond: the Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Pantheon), 289.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1994), “The Vintage,” in Knight, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” 104.
Jane Tompkins (1992), West of Everything (New York: Oxford University Press), 38.
See G. Sabanci (2010), Charlotte Perkins Oilman’s Short Stories as Social Criticism: Conflicts and Contradictions in a Nineteenth-Century Author (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press), 77–91.
C. Perkins Gilman (1998), Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Mineola: Dover Publications).
T. Veblen (1899), The Theory of the Leisure Class, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/833/833-h/833-h.htm, date accessed January 12, 2014.
C. Perkins Gilman (1911), The Crux (New York: The Charlton Company), 171.
C. Perkins Gilman (1911), Something to Vote for, The Forerunner, 3 (June), 134.
For background to the Bollinger baby case and the movie Black Stork, see M. S. Pernick (1996), The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press).
M. Bantha (1993), Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). In Utopia and Cosmopolis, Thomas Peyser draws attention to the significance of the cult of the expert for Gilman’s work.
F. Wegener (1999), “‘What a Comfort Woman Doctor Is!’ Medical Women in the Life and Writing of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” in J. Rudd and V. Gough (eds.), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press), 45.
E. Blackwell (1895), Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women: Autobiographical Sketches by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.), 25.
S. Perkins Gilman (2009), “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Other Stories. R. Shulman (ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press).
H. H. Laughlin (1912), “An Account of the Work of the Eugenics Record Office,” The American Breeders Association Magazine, III, 2, 158.
H. H. Laughlin (1912), “First Annual Conference of the Eugenic Fieldworkers,” The American Breeders Association Magazine, III, 4, 265–269. See also “Report on the Conference of the Research Committee of the Eugenic Section,” American Breeder’s Magazine, II, 2 (1911), 145–154.
J. S. Tuttle (2004), “Gilman’s The Crux and Owen Wister’s The Virginian: Intertextuality and ‘Woman’s Manifest Destiny,” in C. J. Davis and D. D. Knight (eds.), Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Lntellectual Codes (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press), 128.
See G. W. Johnson (1932), “Note on Race Prejudice,” The North American Review, 233, 3 (March), 226–234.
O. Wister (1981), The Virginian (New York: Macmillan), 68.
See Gilman, The Living, 93; The Forerunner (August 1915 and June 1916); G. Scharnhorst and J. Campbell Reesman (1989), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Twayne Publishers), 98;
and G. Scharnhorst and D. D. Knight (1997), “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Library: A Reconstruction,” Resources for American Literary Study, 23, 2, 181–219.
See J. Tuttle (2002), Introduction to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Crux (Newark: University of Delaware Press), 11–75; Tuttle, “Gilman’s The Crux and Owen Wister’s The Virginian”;
J. Tuttle (2000), “Rewriting the West Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Owen Wister, and the Sexual Politics of Neurasthenia,” in C. Golden and J. Schneider Zangrando (eds.), The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Newark: University of Delaware Press), 103–121.
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Luczak, E.B. (2015). Eugenic Strands in the Gynaecocentric Criticism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In: Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137545794_5
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