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Thesis ID: CBB001561844

Guardians of the Race: Scientific Eugenics and the Woman Question in Germany and the United States, 1900--1945 (2004)

University of Utah
Smelser, Ronald M.

Publication Date: 2004
Edition Details: Advisor: Smelser, Ronald M.
Physical Details: 289 pp.
Language: English

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African Americans and science Women Science and gender Eugenics Reproduction Cross-national comparison 20th century, early United States Germany

During the first four decades of the twentieth-century, eugenists' attempts to control women's reproduction---to increase the birthrates of people they considered ``fit'' and to decrease or eliminate those of the ``unfit''---involved them in broad-ranging public debates over the ``women question'' which occupied Americans and Europeans during the same period of time. Although German and American scientific eugenists held nearly identical models of genetics, their understandings of the biological nature of the female sex and the race-building prescriptions they aimed at women differed substantially. This dissertation analyzes eugenic arguments over women's education, entrance into the professions, welfare provisions, protective legislation, suffrage, and reproductive freedom to find ideological, social, and geopolitical explanations for those national differences. The opinions of middle-class educated eugenists carried the weight of scientific expertise and had practical consequences for women's lives. Conversely, however, eugenists' culturally located imaginations colored their beliefs about women, and their public utterances and writings were limited further by what was politically possible. This work uses eugenic rhetoric as a lens through which to view the social construction and maintenance of female gender roles, anticipating that the contrasts and comparisons between the two countries will render the process more visible in both contexts. On the ideological level, American eugenists' discussions of women reveal their commitment to individuality, meritocracy, and liberal capitalism. Germans showed a more collectivist definition of racial health and emphasized the individual's duty to the commonweal. The biology of femaleness and the eugenics of women's roles were also influenced by the actual historical state of gender relations in the two countries. American women's greater presence in public, in the universities and, therefore, in the institutions of eugenics, gave them an advantage over German women in defining the limits of political possibility for any racial improvement schemes. Finally, eugenic rhetoric on the ``woman question'' was critically dependent on where eugenists located their greatest racial threat. Germans most feared of a military conquest from outside their borders. This tempered all their efforts to improve population quality with a perceived need to increase the quantity, creating insistent demands for women's reproductive work. Americans, meanwhile, were most concerned about inundation by immigrants and about those they deemed ``unfit'' already within their borders---the poor and working classes, the criminal and ``feebleminded,'' and ethnic and racial minorities. American eugenists could therefore assign middle-class white women's public reform work a eugenic value in controlling the ``dangerous classes.''

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65/11 (2005): 4308. UMI pub. no. 3152629.

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