| Book Review | Health and History, 7.2

Book Review

Love and Eugenics in the Late–Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. By Angelique Richardson (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, ISBN 0-1981-8700-9) 250 pp.

It is perhaps surprising that the British eugenics movement has been so well studied given the indifference or firm opposition of most legislators of the late 1800s and 1900s to the idea of selective human breeding. Whereas biologists in the United States and most horrifically in Nazi Germany assumed considerable power as the arbiters of racial and national health, in Britain the eugenics societies remained 'talking shops' which could boast a number of prestigious members but little in the way of action. Yet eugenics in Britain is an important topic for a number of reasons: it provides an important perspective on class relations in the turbulent years at the end of the Victorian era, it illustrates how leading biologists and doctors extended their biological paradigm to the political sphere, and it reveals the emergence of a fascinating collectivist counterpoint to the individualism that prevailed through much of the Victorian era. Scholars such as Diane Paul, G.R. Searle, Pauline Mazumdar, Angus McLaren, Richard Soloway, Greta Jones, Lyndsay Farrall, and Daniel Kevles have covered this ground in fascinating detail.

In recent years studies have emphasised that eugenics, in Britain as elsewhere, had an astonishingly broad constituency. Diane Paul, amongst others, has shown the affinities between eugenics and sections of the political left, not least the tight associations between Fabianism and the movement's idea of a top-down management of the nation's hereditary well-being. Most historians of eugenics have also noted how some Victorian feminists perceived in eugenics a means of empowering women and gaining for them unprecedented sexual freedom. Angelique Richardson's useful contribution to this literature, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century, is the first book-length treatment of the links between Victorian feminism and the idea of 'rational reproduction.'

By necessity, the first few chapters of Love and Eugenics cover ground that will be familiar to scholars of late–nineteenth century science and society: the eugenic ideas of Galton, the 'biological straitjacket' tailored for women by leading scientists (not least Darwin and Huxley), and the growing fear of racial degeneration. But throughout these discussions, Richardson introduces material which will be new to most scholars of the area and period. In particular, she explores how a number of feminist writers and novelists—Ellice Hopkins, Sarah Grand, and George Egerton among them—sought to empower their fellow women by arguing that the nation could only be regenerated through women being granted the freedom to make independent, and rational, marital choices.

The chief novelty and importance of Richardson's study is her focus on 'New Woman' novelists of the late 1800s who until now have hardly been mentioned by historians of eugenics. Grand and Egerton have only been extensively discussed by literary scholars, but as Richardson points out, few of them have explored their commitment to eugenic ideas. Richardson offers several explanations as to why the role of feminists in popularising and promoting eugenic ideas has been so widely neglected. It is partly a function of the fact that for all their popularity in their own time most of the novelists she discusses slipped into obscurity during the twentieth century. But while recent feminist scholars have rediscovered writers like Grand and Egerton, Richardson argues that they have held them up as shining examples of prescient liberalism and in doing so have missed or passed over the overt biological essentialism to be found in their works. Love and Eugenics un-bowdlerises novelists kike Grand and Egerton and in doing so presents a rich new angle on the histories of feminism and eugenics.

Richardson explains how, for some New Women of the late–nineteenth century, the idea of eugenics had much appeal. Since childbearing was so integral to notions of proper womanhood, feminist writers could simply argue that in matters of marital choice and maternity they had an unquestioned primacy. Moreover, they could turn to their advantage the staple claim of biologists that man's lustfulness contrasted unfavourably with woman's relative asexuality. In matters of love, feminists argued, women are able to place reason before appetite, thereby allowing them to put the quality of their offspring and the future of the race before the satisfaction of mere pleasure. Realising this potential required that middle-class women be empowered so they could make the right choices.

Yet, as Richardson shows, not all women who believed that women as mothers must act as guardians of the race were willing to subvert gender stereotypes. On the contrary, some of them felt that the suffragettes were dangerously irresponsible and that the biological quality of the race could be safeguarded without votes for women or any other legal concessions. 'Eugenic love' was often portrayed by its female advocates as an expression of good old-fashioned maternal self-sacrifice, the mother's idealised devotion to her children extrapolated to the level of nation and empire.

And one means of promoting this sense of maternal duty was through the writing of essentially homiletic fiction. Richardson devotes two illuminating chapters to Sarah Grand, and the role of her bestsellers like The Heavenly Twins (1893) in popularising the eugenic credo. An ardent believer in eugenic feminism and onetime president of the Writers' Suffrage League, Grand was appalled by the 'reckless' reproduction of the lower classes and convinced that the nation's health demanded that duty be placed before lust or blind romance in marital choices. Hence the spectre of hereditary disease hangs over several of Grand's novels. Those characters who married out of infatuation rather than for higher ends ended up ruing their mistakes. Marital bliss and racial integrity both required careful premarital scrutiny. Likewise, Grand's contemporary female novelist, George Egerton, identified romance unredeemed by reason as personally and racially destructive. Love had to be grounded in a sense of biological responsibility.

Richardson's discussion of Sarah Grand's novels in particular might surprise some of her modern admirers. For Grand's eugenic sensibilities have seldom if ever been so clearly and openly elucidated. Indeed, one of the chief strengths of Love and Eugenics is that it never tries to shoehorn Victorian feminists into the clichéd schema of the unprejudiced campaigner for universal fairness and decency. Victorian feminism was a complex and fascinating phenomenon and this book drives the point home. Thus, Richardson shows, for all her outspoken radicalism Sarah Grand believed wholeheartedly in the inevitability of gender differences. Women warranted greater political power, she said, because their femininity gave them insights which men usually lacked (she suggested that there be a parliamentary House of Ladies devoted to such issues). Grand recoiled from the 'silliness and hysterical feebleness' cultivated by many of her sex, but she had no time for claims that men and women were essentially the same in intellect and emotions. Through a willingness to present her selection of New Woman novelists as they presented themselves, Richardson provides a valuably 'warts and all' history of how feminism intersected with biological racism and hereditarian elitism. This is a genuinely important contribution to the history of British feminism. It is, as Richardson says, a 'vital chapter' in feminist thought.

Less clear is whether Richardson is correct to see the novels of New Women like Grand and Egerton as embodying 'the most sustained expressions of eugenic ideas' in England. This would seem to be a claim too far: surely the innumerable articles, papers, and opinion pieces that appeared in late Victorian newspapers and journals, written by doctors, scientists, politicians, psychiatrists, statesmen, and those sundry professionals mandated to diagnose and treat social ills, had a more profound and lasting impact. Even so, Love and Eugenics enriches our understanding of eugenics in Britain and provides a fascinating study into the political plasticity of the concept of selective human breeding.

John C. Waller

University of Melbourne

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