Rensing, Susan Marie (Author)
University of Notre Dame
Vanden Bossche, Chris
Psomiades, Kathy
Edition Details: Advisor: Vanden Bossche, Chris; Kathy Psomiades
Physical Details: 196 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation examines the development of "feminist eugenics"---the advancement of social policies aimed at improving the hereditary quality of the human race through empowering and emancipating women in the United States from the 1880s into the 1920s.The historical narrative of feminist eugenics in America falls into three phases. The first phase marks the formation of feminist eugenics within the context of the suffrage, social purity, and free love movements. Research for this period centers on the writings of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the 1880s, Moses Harman's free love periodical Lucifer, the Light Bearer, which began in 1890 and would eventually become the American Journal of Eugenics in 1907, and the social purity Journal of Heredity that was funded by the Women's Christian Temperance Union throughout the 1880s. This section argues that the scientific writings of Francis Galton on eugenics were used by these reformers as part of a larger campaign of scientific social reform in late nineteenth century America. The second phase begins when feminist eugenics clashed with the mainstream eugenics movement that began to formulate a much different agenda around 1900. Eugenicists like Charles Davenport attempted to define eugenics along racial, instead of sexual, lines. Thus, the process of institutionalizing eugenics entailed a conscious, directed effort to exclude women's reforms from the eugenic platform. In the third stage, prominent feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Margaret Sanger negotiated between feminist eugenics and the increasingly more established twentieth-century eugenics discourse.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 67/06 (2006). UMI pub. no. 3221321.
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