By Harriet Canty
Edited by Frank Oddy and Mark Potter
“The key to understanding the form which social Darwinism took in any given society lies in the character of the political struggles going on in that society”. Discuss this claim with reference to social Darwinism in Britain.
With the Darwinian scholarly industry now being so well established it is unsurprising that
works on eugenics and thus birth control has followed in a similar vein.[1] Even with this
academic focus, women, despite their profound relevance to the topic both in terms of the
subject matter and the role they played; are not sufficiently emphasised by historians. Richard Soloway cites the plummeting birth rates as one of the most compelling factors driving the eugenics movement in Britain.[2] With increased politicisation of the female body, these fertility anxieties tended to lie at the doors of women thus making eugenics an attempt to manipulate women’s reproductive power.[3] Outside of mainstream eugenics, women tended to have key roles in various offshoot groups and societies, ranging from the Women’s Birth Control League to the Women’s Cooperative Guild, often joining for social and political reasons, consequently allowing an insight into wider eugenic thought. For the purpose of this essay a political struggle will be taken to mean a topic of a politicised nature that has caused some sort of wider societal struggle. This includes the wider fertility debate, the burgeoning Woman Question, and the First World War and the rising socialist feeling of the 1920s and 1930s. What is more significant is the struggle involved in such an event which subsequently had an effect on the eugenics movement. Social Darwinism will largely be taken to be synonymous with eugenics with its form, such as positive or negative, being the focus of the essay. Through the analysis of individual women, a reliance of the works of Richard
Soloway, and primary sources from the Eugenics Review, the effect of such political struggle
will be analysed. With Charles Darwin himself never making any reference to birth control,
its looming role in the social Darwinism of the twentieth century can be seen to be attributed
to social factors rather than strictly scientific ones.[4]
The fertility debate is the key, over-arching struggle faced by the social Darwinism over the
opening decades of the twentieth century despite societies, such as Eugenics Education
Society (EES) themselves, playing a large role in perpetuating this fear. With the rise of
knowledge surrounding birth control and the blame placed upon contraception for the decline in births, fertility soon became a political issue and thus constitutes as a political struggle that heavily influenced social Darwinism. Soloway’s qualitative analysis of the hysteria caused by a declining birth-rate in European countries at the turn of the century highlights how social Darwinism took this as evidence racial decline.[5] What is vital to stipulate is that it was not the overall decline, which was cause for concern, but rather the comparative reduction in the size of upper- and middle-class families compared to their working-class contemporaries. This can be seen in an article in the first volume of the Eugenics Review in 1909 stating “The birth-rate has declined twenty-five per cent since 1876, and since there has been but little change in the lowest strata.”[6] With the scientific misunderstandings of the female body ranging from assumptions of limited male causation in pregnancy to the suggestion that women had a lesser hereditary impact than men left women and their supposed use of contraception to bear the brunt of the fertility debate.[7] The initial fear of birth rates led to mainstream social Darwinism following a program of largely positive eugenics, focusing on why middle-class women were failing to reproduce at the same rate as their working class counterparts. This can be seen in William Inge’s article who stresses the importance of the upper strata of society reproducing, questioning why “we do not think it wicked to encourage a beautiful and glorious specimen of womanhood to become a nun or sister of mercy, with vows of perpetual virginity.”[8] Whilst eugenicists’ views on this vary, especially those on the feminist side of the debate as will later be delved into; social Darwinism’s emphasis on women and their bodies tends to remain at the forefront of the debate.
Given the gendered nature of this debate it is undoubtedly important to focus on some of the
individual women involved in the movement and to analyse the extent to which they helped
form social Darwinism. Marie Stopes’ role in the overall movement is significant to the
extent that her name has recently been removed from the birth control clinic she helped to
create due to the negative associations of her eugenic beliefs. Stopes was undeniably a key
figure in the marriage of the crisis of low birth rates and the implementation of contraception.[9] Stopes wrote five books concerning birth control to some degree from 1918 to 1929. These books lacked any broader political framework yet occasionally featured heavy
eugenic undertones; but the focus generally lay upon contraception and sexual pleasure.[10]
Whilst Stopes was, from 1921, a lifelong member of the EES her relationship with the society
was complicated. Many other members, including Leonard Darwin, personally disliked her
due to her arrogance or simply disagreed with her strong views on birth control.[11] In the same year that she became a member of the EES she set up the mothers’ clinic in Holloway, a
working class area of London which, by 1937, had treated twenty six thousand women.[12] By looking at individual actors that operated within the eugenics movement it is easier to
understand the contradictions that seemingly encompass social Darwinism as, when it is
deconstructed, it is not so united a movement as is often presumed. Many of those who
agreed with the concept of eugenics were not necessarily key members of groups such as the
EES. Those who were, such as Marie Stopes, were still able to hold differing opinions on
subject such as birth control. Despite not entirely adhering to their viewpoint, Stopes was a
factor in moulding the EES into a group that by the mid-1920s began to see birth control as a
necessary evil and moved towards a programme of more negative eugenics, focus on working
class fertility rather than concentrating their efforts on the upper echelons of society.
The suffrage movement has become associated with the eugenics movement largely due to
overlapping members, most prolifically Emmeline Pankhurst. Soloway sees “modern
feminism” as finding eugenics more attractive given that it provided an alternative to
marrying an undesirable husband.[13] The relationship, however, between the two movements is somewhat more complicated than this suggests. Mabel Atkinson thought that the women’s movement paired with eugenics helped to bring forward social Darwinism’s questionable views on women.[14] Simply by taking a look at early issues of the Eugenics Review there is no singular article dedicated to the issue of either suffrage group before the start of the First World War.[15] Traditional social Darwinists were concerned that despite the majority of the suffragettes being from a middle class background, and thus being the best candidates for “race motherhood”, the birth rate amongst their members was especially low.[16] Suffragette militancy started from around 1905 and lead to arguments over the racial consequences of female emancipation.[17] The debate is best encapsulated by the division between the traditional Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. The latter, being the more liberal of the two, largely seemed to support the women’s struggle whereas Galton, on the alternative side, thought women were too feeble-minded for education.[18] They both agreed, however, that the final answer to the Woman Question had to be compatible with the idea of “race motherhood”.[19] Soloway suggests that the Woman Question should be seen in parallel to the Condition of England question, describing the former as the female demands for, in short, increased rights including the vote, education, property, and even sexuality.[20] By framing this within the context of the Condition of England question it adequately represents the anxieties of the nineteenth century moving into the twentieth century. The women’s demands caused for the established order of the patriarchal family to risk destabilisation and have the anxieties of the EES to be potentially realised.
When looking at mainstream eugenics, Galton’s traditional utopian vision is clear in the
earlier days of the EES. In order to fully understand the form of social Darwinism as a whole
it is vital to look at the outliers of the movement, outside of the mainstream Eugenics Society.
Within the feminist movement a particularly key figure is that of Stella Browne. Browne was
a socialist and briefly a member of the Communist Party before leaving in 1923 due to their
lack of interest in contraception.[21] She frequently wrote for the Malthusian League, later
renamed New Generations, as they were only group in Britain who actively stood for birth
control.[22] Despite being an avid feminist she was only briefly a member of the Women’s
Social and Political Union (WSPU) leaving in 1910 due to its dogmatic and bureaucratic
nature.[23] Greta Jones in an article on Women in Eugenics draws attention to three key women in the movement, one of them being Stella Browne.[24] Jones does, however, focus far more heavily on the other women largely because they conformed more to the ideas of the EES and thus made for an easier analysis. By the 1930s Browne was a founding member of Abortion Law Reform Association (ARLA) which was able to give a more woman-centric view of the abortion debate.[25] Although her views on female sexual pleasure are not far from those of Marie Stopes, Browne differs in her beliefs about the working class which are not quite as scathing. In fact, it could be argued, as Lesley Hall does, that Browne has been somewhat falsely associated with the eugenics movement simply due to her own use of the term eugenics.[26] This, however, takes away from the complexities of the differences between individuals who followed some sort of eugenic thinking. Whilst Browne does not explicitly help us understand the majority of views with mainstream eugenics, she does reveal another non-traditionalist facade. It is these peripheral figures within social Darwinism that helped to push eugenics into a different direction after the First World War.
To see the war as a political struggle allows us to deconstruct the various long-term effects it
had on the form that social Darwinism was able to take in the interwar period. The war saw
concerns over venereal diseases (VD) spike due to what Browne saw as a rise in more
promiscuous behaviour.[27] Feminist attention to VD had prevailed since the Contagious
Diseases Act of the previous century which placed the blame of the disease squarely on the
shoulders of female sex workers. The passing of the 1917 Venereal Diseases Act therefore
reignited feminist interest in the sexual double standard leading into heightened interest in
contraceptives in the inter-war period. The end of the war also brought up class issues. Much
of the language used within social Darwinism had been questioned by C. P. Blacker as
having classist undertones with phrases such as “riff-raff” and “dregs”.[28] Darwin, the
chairman for the EES, drew away from Galton’s imagery of the prize bull sensing that in
post-war Britain comparing the lower classes to breeding stock was now insensitive given the
images of men as cattle conjured up during the war.[29] The significance of the working class
fighting for their country did somewhat disprove the eugenic ideas of the early twentieth
century. In a 1918 volume of the Eugenics Review ,Havelock Ellis reviews a book titled
After-War Problems written by Alfred Marshall a year earlier predicting what Britain was to
face at the end of the conflict.[30] Ellis sees this undertaking as “risky” highlighting the
uncertainty felt by society at the time and is frustrated that despite the numerous essays “the
vital problems of eugenics and the breeding of the future race are never so much as
mentioned.”[31] The extent to which Ellis is reluctant to envisage a future reveals the extent to which the war left eugenics on unstable footing for the inter-war period.
Perhaps in conjunction with the effects of the war, the 1920s and 1930s saw a burgeoning
liberalisation of social Darwinism. After the Representation of the People Act in 1918 and the
first, though admittedly minority, Labour governments; it is unsurprising that social Darwinism, to some extent, followed suit. Whilst left-wing members of EES were
longstanding, socialism and eugenics were seen to be complimentary doctrines; in the words of Sidney Webb “no consistent eugenist [sic] can be a ‘laissez faire’ individualist”.[32] Yet, it
was in the 1920s that socialist critiques of “hard hereditarianism” truly began to take
effect [33] It is through the altering views on birth control that this divide becomes increasingly clear. The post-war baby boom saw a rise in the population but this was more a cause for concern than celebration, with geneticist William Bateson stating "If we could see a parade of the parents who have made themselves responsible for this excess, I wonder if we should take so much pride in their performance”.[34] Here we see a shift from which class of women most concerned social Darwinists; from the celibacy of “well-bred” middle-class women to focusing on the working-class mothers. On the whole, eugenicists no longer wanted to return to the birth rates of fifty years before but wanted a change from natural selection to rational selection, thus favouring birth control as a form of negative
eugenics.[35] By 1925 most modern eugenicists saw birth control as a great tool for negative eugenics.[36] Soloway sees the EES conceding to the use of contraception as an inevitable loss, with Darwin finally conceding in 1926 that contraception could be a eugenic agent.[37]
There was additionally an increased interest in the use of sterilisation, although it never came into fruition, a bill was put to parliament in 1931 for the voluntary sterilisation of “mental defectives”.[38] The EES was equally divided on this issue which is clear from the necessity of various offshoot eugenic groups, such as the Women’s Cooperative Guild, who campaigned for compulsory sterilisation. Reform eugenics, prolific in the late 1930s, is sketched by Volker Roelcke as supposedly compatible with liberal and socialist political ideas.[39] Pauline Mazumdar suggests that these ideas were an alternative to a Mendelist philosophy as these pseudoscientific ideas were dwindling.[40] Perhaps this explains the main demographic by the late 1930s were working class housewives, rather than scientists, who believed access to birth control, would have positive effects on their lives. Despite there seemingly being a switch to a more socialist form of eugenics within mainstream social Darwinism, many of the organisations’ more traditional members remained such as R. A. Fischer whose main concern of the 1920s and 1930s was a working-class reliance on family allowances and other forms of welfare. Nevertheless, this concern remains aimed at the working-class mother and child rather than the middle- and upper-class woman.
Social Darwinism can be seen to adapt with the times and react accordingly but analysing
such a movement simply brings forwards the inconsistencies of various politics and opinions
throughout the mainstream and sub-groups. By largely examining this topic through the lens
of womanhood these complexities are best revealed. Given the brevity of this essay, I have
been unable to fully delve into the personal lives of individual working-class women who
either supported the cause or felt its impact. An additionally intriguing political struggle
could have been the impact of the empire, but both these factors shall have to wait for another opportunity. Within the realm of eugenics, especially when birth control and female
sterilisation are up for debate, women should never be overlooked as it is largely their bodies
which are the overarching focus.
Notes
[1] Richard A. Soloway, "The 'Perfect Contraceptive': Eugenics and Birth Control Research in Britain and America in the Interwar Years." Journal of Contemporary History 30/4 (1995), p. 637.
[2] Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birth-rate in Twentieth Century Britain (UNC Press Books, 2014), p. xiii.
[3] Greta Jones, "Women and Eugenics in Britain: The Case of Mary Scharlieb, Elizabeth Sloan Chesser, and Stella Browne." Annals of Science 52/5 (1995), p. 483.
[4] Marc Dhont, Darwin and Birth Control. The European Journal of Contraception & Reproductive Health Care, 14/2 (2009), pp. 83–85.
[5] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, p. xx
[6] William Inge, “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics.” The Eugenics Review, 1/1 (1909), p. 29 [7] Soloway, "The 'Perfect Contraceptive'. p. 639; Soloway, Demography and Degeneration. p. 115.
[8] Inge, “Some Moral Aspects”. p. 31.
[9] Alexander C. T. Geppert, "Divine Sex, Happy Marriage, Regenerated Nation: Marie Stopes's Marital Manual Married Love and the Making of a Best-Seller, 1918-1955." Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1998. p. 389.
[10] Geppert, “Divine Sex”. p. 432.
[11] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration. p. 181; Soloway, Demography and Degeneration. p. 400.
[12] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration. p. 389.
[13] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration p. 129.
[14] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration. P.129.
[15] “The Eugenics Review”, US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/1186/> [Accessed 03 January 2021].
[16] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration p. 113.
[17] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration p. 124.
[18] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration p. 115.
[19] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration p. 122.
[20] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration p. 111.
[21] Lesley A. Hall, "“I Have Never Met the Normal Woman”: Stella Browne and the Politics of Womanhood." Women's History Review, 6/2 (1997), p. 160.
[22] Hall, “I Have Never Met”, p. 160.
[23] Hall, “I Have Never Met”, p. 160.
[24] Jones, "Women and Eugenics in Britain”. pp. 481-502.
[25] Ann Farmer, By Their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the Abortion Campaign (CUA Press, Washington D.C. 2008), p. 80.
[26] Hall, “I Have Never Met”, p. 172
[27] Hall, “I Have Never Met”, p. 165
[28] David Redvaldsen, "Eugenics, Socialists and the Labour Movement in Britain, 1865–1940." Historical Research. 90/250 (2017), p. 777.
[29] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, pp. 167-168.
[30] Ellis, Havelock. “After-War Problems.” The Eugenics Review. 10/1 (1918), pp.47–48.
[31] Ellis, “After-War Problems”, p. 48.
[32] Redvaldsen, “Eugenics, Socialists”. p. 769; Leo Lucassen, "A Brave New World: The Left, Social Engineering, and Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Europe." International Review of Social History 55/2 (2010), p. 263.
[33] Redvaldsen, “Eugenics, Socialists”. p. 773.
[34] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration. p. 168.
[35] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration. p. 165.
[36] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration. p. 177.
[37] Soloway, Demography and Degeneration. p. 184.
[38] “Sterilisation”, Hansard Sittings (July 1931) <https://api.parliament.uk/historic-
hansard/commons/1931/jul/21/sterilization> [Accessed 03 January 2021].
[39] Volker Roelcke, "Eugenic Concerns, Scientific Practices: International Relations in the
Establishment of Psychiatric Genetics in Germany, Britain, the USA and Scandinavia, c. 1910–60." History of Psychiatry. 30/1 (2019), p. 19.
[40] Mazumdar, Pauline MH. "‘Reform’ eugenics and the Decline of Mendelism." Trends in
Genetics. 18/1 (2002), p. 48.
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