Eugenics in Late 19th‐Century Feminist Utopias

• Date: 01 November 2018
• Author: Christina Lake
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12251
• Published date: 01 November 2018

Eugenics in Late 19th-Century

Feminist Utopias

By Christina Lake

abstraCt. Late 19th-century feminist utopian fiction provides

empowering examples of societies governed by women. However,

these imaginary societies only exist through radical changes to

women’s reproductive roles. At the same time, these societies also

anticipate feminist interest in eugenics through proposals to regulate

marriage, eliminate unhealthy members of society, and adopt measures

for the moral improvement of the human race. Elizabeth Corbett’s

New Amazonia (1889) argues that a state governed only by women

would achieve high moral standards, while eugenics and strict

scientific regulation would guarantee improvements in health and

longevity. Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1880–1881) proposes an

entirely separatist world where the elimination of men, following the

development of an asexual process of reproduction, would lead to a

scientifically perfect society. Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant’s

Unveiling a Parallel (1893), on the other hand, questions the idea of

the intrinsic immorality of men, showing a utopia wherein women

behave as badly as men given the same societal freedom. Instead,

eugenic selection has supported evolution to a higher state of morality

in which children are no longer conceived through sexual acts.

Introduct ion

The last three decades of the 19th century saw the publication of

an unprecedented number of works of utopian fiction or utopian

speculation written by women. Darby Lewes (1995) lists at least 65

titles first published in Europe and America between 1870 and 1900,

which is a large number for a genre where works by women were

previously quite rare. Most of these works have been forgotten or only

rescued from oblivion by academics and specialist presses in recent

American Jour nal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 5 (Novembe r, 2018).

DOI: 10 .1111/ajes.12251

© 2018 American Journ al of Economics and Sociology, Inc

*Holds a PhD in Literatu re from the University of Exeter a nd is Head of Academic

Liaison and Research for L ibrary & Archives, Falmouth Exeter Plus. Emai l: christina.l@

virgin.net

1278 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

decades. Written at a time of shifting gender relations, these lost uto-

pias reflect the tensions and hopes in the lives of women as they

struggled to reassess their role and identity in society. Some of them

involve gender role reversals: Annie Denton Cridge’s Man’s Rights;

or How Would You Like It? (1870), experimental communes where

women and men work side by side to change gender roles, as in

Marie Howland’s Papa’s Own Girl (1874), or Jane Hume Clapperton’s

Margaret Dunmore; or, A Socialist Home (1888). These early feminist

utopias also demonstrate growing concerns over issues of sexuality

and reproduction. Carol Farley Kessler’s (1984: 8) examination of 59

pre-1970s U.S. feminist utopias revealed that 64 percent saw marriage

as a problem, compared to only 24 percent that “presented suffrage

as part of a solution to women’s place in society.” Inequality of power

in marriage was often an issue, but so were women’s responsibilities

for choosing the right husband, regulating the size of their family, and

balancing the duties of motherhood with education and careers.

Women’s engagement with the idea of improving the health of fu-

ture generations and their hope that science could offer new solutions

to the problems of balancing family life with a public role led to an

interest in the potential of evolutionary science and eugenics to im-

prove women’s social position and enhance human nature. The term

eugenics was coined by Francis Galton in 1883 for the study of the

hereditary elements that affected the quality of the human population

and became a popular social movement in the early 20th century,

supported by women from a range of backgrounds (Kevles 1995;

Richardson 2003). Eugenics aimed at encouraging the right people

to marry and, more importantly, preventing the so-called unfit from

breeding. Although the concept of eugenics led to horrific human

rights violations such as enforced sterilization and the systematic ex-

termination of European Jews in Nazi Germany, the idea of eugenics

was very appealing in the late 19th century as a supposedly scientific

method of eradicating disease, poverty, criminal behavior, and other

negative qualities believed to be a result of heredity. Late 19th-century

feminists in Britain and the USA were already beginning to look at

ways of improving sexual morality and preventing sexually transmit-

ted diseases from affecting the health of their children. As social his-

torian Linda Gordon (2002: 68) argues, concerns with “regeneration

1279Eugenics in Late 19th-Century Feminist Utopias

of the race” and eugenics were “characteristic of nearly all feminists

of the late nineteenth century.” Appropriating eugenic arguments to

support women’s position on sexual morality also led to a conviction

that eugenics could apply to moral as well as physical characteristics

and that it was women’s role to support the future evolution of the

human race towards a higher moral state.

This overlap between interests in women’s rights, evolutionary sci-

ence, eugenics, and sexual morality is evident in the three works of

feminist utopian fiction discussed in this article. Written towards the

end of the 19th century, they all engage with scientific arguments over

the nature of women, and see control over nature, both women’s bi-

ological nature and natural forces in the external world, as important

to the progress of society. In New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future,

Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett (1889) imagines a feminist utopia set in a

future Ireland where the highest posts in society are reserved for an

elite group of celibate women, excessive reproduction is criminalized,

and marriage is regulated on eugenic lines. Mary E. Bradley Lane’s

(1880–1881) separatist feminist utopia Mizora: A World of Women

portrays a country where men no longer exist, reproduction occurs

asexually, and the role of the mother is celebrated not penalized.

Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant’s (1893) Unveiling a Parallel

addresses the question of moral evolution through the representation

of two contrasting utopian societies, the first a feminist satire on mas-

culine values, and the second a more refined society whose citizens

have consciously progressed beyond their appetite for greed and sex

to form a more egalitarian, supportive society.

The imaginary worlds invented by Corbett, Lane, and Jones and

Merchant illustrate some aspect of the interaction between evolution-

ary ideas of progress and women’s arguments for women’s equality

or superiority, even, to men. They all recommend eugenic measures

of some description, though without using the term eugenics, which

was not in common use at the time. Instead, they demonstrate the

multiple sources of eugenic ideas in circulation in late 19th-century so-

ciety, borrowing from areas as diverse as Malthusianism, social purity,

evolutionary science, perfectionist spirituality, and horticulture.

These works of utopian fiction indicate that late 19th-century fem-

inists were uneasy about the commonly held association between