Sex, Suffrage and the Stage by Leslie Hill

Author:Leslie Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK

Eugenics

Eugenics, the ‘science’ of improving human stock, was used by conservative and progressive thinkers alike, including dramatists, to further their diverse theories on motherhood in relation to human evolution and to the nation-state. The idea of selective human breeding can be traced back to antiquity, with Plato advocating a state-run programme of procreation to fortify the guardian class in The Republic. The Victorian eugenics movement was founded by Francis Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin) who coined the term ‘eugenics’, meaning ‘good in birth’, in 1883. Galton’s goal was to improve the human race through positively encouraging breeding in the ‘fittest’ members of society while negatively discouraging or preventing breeding among the ‘weak’ – accelerating nature’s process of selection. Defining the fittest and the weakest members of society was, of course, revealing of class, race and gender prejudices, with the working classes generally described as ‘undesirable’ along with ‘the feebleminded’, a popular but vague Victorian term which could mean anything from criminally insane to alcoholic, uneducated or poor. The fittest, of course, were the (white) upper and middle classes. Eugenic theories were considerably energized in 1900 by a rediscovery of Mendel’s laws on biological inheritance, which privileged ‘nature’ to the virtual exclusion of ‘nurture’ as a causative factor of behaviour and ability. Social and economic conditions such as poverty, illiteracy and prostitution were cast simplistically in Mendelian terms as genetic traits that would be inherited rather than behaviours rooted in social conditions thus eliminating the need to address or reform those social conditions.

A sense of panic among the upper and middle classes about being out-peopled by undesirables became a rationale for the advocacy of state-regulated eugenic policies to prevent an apocalyptic ‘race suicide’ (Sprague, 1915, p. 158). Proponents of eugenics attempted to quell social anxieties over a rise in the working-class population, frequently characterized in terms of degeneration and atavism, by proposing a form of race control in which the fittest members of society (upper- and middle-class people like themselves) would become the genetic guardians of British stock. The increasing popularity of evolutionary theory meant that impoverished material living and working conditions could now be dismissed as the result of biological degeneracy, leading to arguments against state support and private philanthropy aimed at helping the poor or infirm as unnaturally perpetuating withered stock.7 As I touched on in the Introduction, race had a broader meaning to Victorians than it does today, as anthropologists classified races by environmental elements like languages and cultures as well as by inherited physical traits like skin tone, conflating heredity and culture. When nineteenth-century authors speak of ‘the race’ in terms of British nationalism and the need to replenish the population, we can infer they are speaking of the white majority, but it does not always follow that they are thinking in terms of ethnicity.8 The slippage between race and culture9 in the era means that notions of perpetuating ‘the race’ aren’t exclusive to racial types. The dramatists considered here are much more explicit about class differences in terms of racial ‘fitness’ than they are about geographic or ethnic origins.

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