| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938. By Laura L. Lovett. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xii, 236 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3107-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-5803-5.)

Laura L. Lovett's Conceiving the Future is a useful complement to recent studies on the history of the family and eugenics in the twentieth century. Lovett focuses on the ideological and cultural ideals that shaped policies central to the formation of family life in the United States and argues that a deeply embedded pronatalism was promulgated in a way that has not been fully examined, in contrast with the study of similar, more overt, policies in France and Germany in the same period. Lovett uncovers a strong current of pronatalism that operated as a form of social control promoted by a variety of interlocking reform movements. She admits in the introduction that there is a problem with identifying the far more tenuous and indirect policy of pronatalism in the United States, yet her examination of pronatalist discourse through five case studies enables her to focus this study. Lovett ultimately shows that idealizations about motherhood and family life were forged from socially and racially exclusionary models deeply indebted to the eugenics movement.

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