Eugenic Feminism

Eugenic Feminism
Author: Asha Nadkarni
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1452941424

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Asha Nadkarni contends that whenever feminists lay claim to citizenship based on women’s biological ability to “reproduce the nation” they are participating in a eugenic project—sanctioning reproduction by some and prohibiting it by others. Employing a wide range of sources from the United States and India, Nadkarni shows how the exclusionary impulse of eugenics is embedded within the terms of nationalist feminism. Nadkarni reveals connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, demonstrating that both call for feminist citizenship centered on the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. She juxtaposes U.S. and Indian feminists (and antifeminists) in provocative and productive ways: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian novels regard eugenic reproduction as a vital form of national production; Sarojini Naidu’s political speeches and poetry posit liberated Indian women as active agents of a nationalist and feminist modernity predating that of the West; and Katherine Mayo’s 1927 Mother India warns white U.S. women that Indian reproduction is a “world menace.” In addition, Nadkarni traces the refashioning of the icon Mother India, first in Mehboob Khan’s 1957 film Mother India and Kamala Markandaya’s 1954 novel Nectar in a Sieve, and later in Indira Gandhi’s self-fashioning as Mother India during the Emergency from 1975 to 1977. By uncovering an understudied history of feminist interactivity between the United States and India, Eugenic Feminism brings new depth both to our understanding of the complicated relationship between the two nations and to contemporary feminism.

Growing a Race

Growing a Race
Author: Cecily Devereux
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2006-02-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0773573046

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Cecily Devereux reconsiders the extent to which McClung's enduring legacy of crusading for women's rights is founded on the ideas of British eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Caleb Saleeby and implicated in the passage of eugenical legislation in Canada. In a critical study of Painted Fires, the Pearlie Watson books, and several short stories, Devereux attempts to understand McClung's fiction in terms of its engagement with a politics of "race" and nation and constructions of specifically "racial" impurities that many women saw themselves as uniquely able to "cure."

Lady Eugenist

Lady Eugenist
Author: Victoria C. Woodhull
Publisher: Inkling Books
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 1587420422

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Francis Galton is said to have founded eugenics with an 1864 magazine article. But a single article does not make a movement and Galton, by his own admission, did little to promote the idea before 1901. This book demonstrates that eugenists have given us an inaccurate history of their movement, assigning credit to Galton, the eminent half-cousin of Charles Darwin, when the real credit belongs to a woman who was perhaps the most radical nineteenth-century American feminist.That woman was Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for U.S. President and, with her sister, the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street. This book contains all her major speeches and writings on eugenics, showing that she was the first of either sex to take to the road and, in hundreds of speeches across the U.S., champion the idea of creating a perfected humanity by breeding perfect children. She even beat Galton in his own land, moving to England in 1876 and introducing eugenics there.Woodhull was not a shy about her role. The title for this book comes from the headline of a 1912 London newspaper article proclaiming her Lady Eugenist. In 1927, shortly before she died, the New York Times would carry an article in which she praised eugenic sterilization and claimed to have advocated that fifty years ago in my book Marriage of the Unfit.

Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy

Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy
Author: Angela Franks
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2014-12-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0786454040

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Margaret Sanger, the American birth-control and population-control advocate who founded Planned Parenthood, stands like a giant among her contemporaries. With her dominating yet winning personality, she helped generate shifts of opinion on issues that were not even publicly discussed prior to her activism, while her leadership was arguably the single most important factor in achieving social and legislative victories that set the parameters for today's political discussion of family-planning funding, population-control aid, and even sex education. This work addresses Sanger's ideas concerning birth control, eugenics, population control, and sterilization against the backdrop of the larger eugenic context.

The Feminist Political Campaign for Eugenic Legislation in New Jersey, 1910-1942

The Feminist Political Campaign for Eugenic Legislation in New Jersey, 1910-1942
Author: ALAN R. RUSHTON
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-03
Genre:
ISBN: 9781527593039

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As this book shows, between 1910 and 1942, social feminists in New Jersey waged an unsuccessful campaign for legislation that would permit eugenic sterilization of 'feebleminded' and other 'undesirable' citizens. Church archives and religious periodicals described the conflict between Catholic and Protestant citizens regarding this issue. Reform-minded women persisted in their quest for such progressive state legislation despite repeated failures. Their number of potential voters was very small compared to the organized bloc of Catholic citizens who viewed such legislation as immoral and based on bad science, and threatened to unseat any legislator who supported such a notion. This insightful text highlights that public officials would only enact such laws when they were convinced that many citizens supported a particular eugenic goal and then would vote for legislators who satisfied this moral challenge. Public opinion was unprepared for such radical legislation in New Jersey, and legislators learned that to even consider a eugenic sterilization notion would be political suicide.

Marie Stopes: Feminist, Eroticist, Eugenicist

Marie Stopes: Feminist, Eroticist, Eugenicist
Author: William Garrett
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2008-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1435706773

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This book brings together in a single volume Marie Stopes' essential writings. In his Introduction, Professor Garrett sets her ideas into historical context and assesses the extent to which those ideas are, and will continue to become, part of the 21st century.

Growing a Race

Growing a Race
Author: Cecily Devereux
Publisher: MQUP
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2006-02-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780773529373

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Cecily Devereux reconsiders the extent to which McClung's enduring legacy of crusading for women's rights is founded on the ideas of British eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Caleb Saleeby and implicated in the passage of eugenical legislation in Canada. In a critical study of Painted Fires, the Pearlie Watson books, and several short stories, Devereux attempts to understand McClung's fiction in terms of its engagement with a politics of "race" and nation and constructions of specifically "racial" impurities that many women saw themselves as uniquely able to "cure."

Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century

Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century
Author: Angelique Richardson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780198187004

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Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century is a fascinating, lucid, and controversial study of the centrality of eugenic debate to the Victorians. Reappraising the operation of social and sexual power in Victorian society and fiction, it makes a radical contribution to English studies, nineteenth-century and gender studies, and the history of science.

Eugenic Nation

Eugenic Nation
Author: Alexandra Minna Stern
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2015-12-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520960653

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First edition, Winner of the Arthur J. Viseltear Prize, American Public Health Association With an emphasis on the American West, Eugenic Nation explores the long and unsettled history of eugenics in the United States. This expanded second edition includes shocking details demonstrating that eugenics continues to inform institutional and reproductive injustice. Alexandra Minna Stern draws on recently uncovered historical records to reveal patterns of racial bias in California’s sterilization program and documents compelling individual experiences. With the addition of radically new and relevant research, this edition connects the eugenic past to the genomic present with attention to the ethical and social implications of emerging genetic technologies.