Article ID: CBB001550130

A Man `[a]s Black as the Devil Himself': The Radical Life of Benjamin J. Elmy, Secularist, Anti-Eugenicist and `First-Wave' Feminist in Britain (1838--1906) (2014)

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Considerable historical interest has focused on the discourse of degeneracy prevalent within late-nineteenth-century British society. Particular emphasis, for example, has been placed upon the methods of social censure and control contemporary commentators deemed essential in the case of those (including the emancipated, independent `New' Woman and the poverty-stricken, tuberculosis-ridden, metropolitan prostitute) whose sexual behaviour was judged as deviating from prescribed norms.10 As late-Victorian Britain plunged into an economic crisis, and the grimness of urbanised living was revealed and sensationalised by an ever-growing popular press, intellectuals cast around for scapegoats -- those who, by living lives of licentiousness and debauchery, had tainted the nation with the twin spectres of ill health and immorality.11 Fears that such ailing, morally corrupt individuals had the ability to contaminate the gene pool and pass on defective characteristics to subsequent generations were endemic. Thus sex became, in the words of the essayist and individualist feminist Mona Caird -- a key member of Elmy's immediate circle -- the `red-hot heart' of the battle for the future of the human race.12

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Authors & Contributors
Evans, Samantha
Smith, Elise Lawton
Page, Judith W
More, Elizabeth Singer
Weliver, Phyllis
Vandermassen, Griet
Concepts
Science and gender
Women
Feminism
Eugenics
Collected correspondence
Women in science
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
20th century, early
18th century
Places
Great Britain
United States
England
Germany
France
Canada
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