From Cradle to Grave Term 2, Lecture 2
BIRTH, MARRIAGE and EUGENICS
LECTURE OUTLINE
1. Population change
1700-1950
2. Reasons for
population change
3. Contraception
4. Eugenics
5. Social impact of
eugenics
Historians have explained the acceleration of
population growth in one of two ways:
1. It was a consequence of the Industrial and
Agricultural Revolutions and an improved standard
of life (Malthus)
• Rising birth rate
• Changes in marriage patterns – people marry earlier
if economic conditions good
• Reduced death rate
2. It was the result of various public health measures
independent of these Revolutions (McKeown)
• Control of disease (e.g. smallpox vaccination)
• Better nutrition
c.1860s-1930s Britain’s birth rate
declines
• 1870/2 – 34.1 per 1000
• 1910/12 – 24.5 per 1000
• 1930/2 – 15.8 per 1000
Reasons for the declining birth rate
1. Parents have fewer children as more
survive infancy
2. Easier access to contraception
3. Greater willingness to use contraception
4. Children perceived to ‘cost’ more so
parents have fewer (economic usefulness
also declines with introduction of state
education, child worker to scholar idea)
Birth control
• Historians have tended to think
that in 19th century people avoided
contraception….not quite the case.
• Birth control options: coitus
interruptus, abortion, condoms
(also known as sheaths or French
letters) diaphragms, douches,
pessaries, cap.
• Birth control campaigners: Charles
Bradlaugh; Annie Besant republished Charles Knowlton’s The
Fruits of Philosophy (1862)
For females of all ages these
pills are invaluable, as a few
doses of them carry off all
humors, and bring about all
that is required. No female
should be without them. There
is no medicine to be found to
equal Beecham’s Pills for
removing any obstruction or
irregularity of the system. If
taken according to the
directions given with each box,
they will soon restore females
of all ages to sound and robust
health.
A nineteenth century
advertisement for Beecham’s
Pills.
JOSEPH A. BANKS, PROSPERITY AND PARENTHOOD
(LONDON: ROUTLEDGE AND KEGAN PAUL, 1954),
p. 202
• Economic depression of the 1870s and 1880s
undermined middle-class confidence in the future
and encouraged the use of birth control to maintain
living standards
• During the period 1870-1914 childrearing for most
working-class families was increasingly subject to an
array of perceived rising ‘costs’
• It was realised that smaller families enjoyed a better
standard of living than their larger counterparts
• Middle and working classes had rising aspirations
Marie Stopes (1880 - 1958) was a campaigner for women's rights and a
pioneer in the field of family planning, and a Eugenicist
•
1918 - Married Love and Wise
Parenthood
•
1921- Mothers’ Clinic for Birth
Control – free contraceptive
advice for married women
•
1930 National Birth Control
Council (later Family Planning
Association)
•
1930 -16 clinics- 21,000 clients
1939 - 65 clinics
Birth control clinic in caravan, c.1920
Definition of Eugenics
• Eugenics - ‘good’ and ‘born’, ‘science of heredity’
• Term coined 1883 by Francis Galton
• Built on ideas of Darwin’s natural selection, survival
of fittest (Origin of Species, 1859)
• Refers to the belief and practices of improving the
quality of the population.
• ‘If the prudent avoid marriage, whilst the reckless
marry, the inferior members tend to supplant the
better members of society’ (Charles Darwin,
Descent of Man, 1871).
• Also a social philosophy advocating the
improvement of human genetic traits through the
promotion of the reproduction of people with
desired traits (positive eugenics) and the reduced
reproduction of people with less desired traits
(negative eugenics)
Francis Galton, photo taken on visit to Paris
Prefecture of Police, and Alphonse Bertillon
Rise of Eugenics
• By 1900 appeal of eugenics increased
• Tapped into middle- and upper-class
anxieties e.g.
• Concern about decline of Empire and economic
decline of Britain
• Labour unrest, socialism, women’s suffrage
movement
• Fall in birth rate
• Poverty – shown in Booth and Rowntree surveys
• Physical deterioration – Boer War illuminated
unfitness of nation
• Crime, alcoholism, promiscuity, VD
• Poor and ‘undesirable’ surviving due to state
intervention and public health reform – ‘residuum’
growing
Who were Eugenicists?
Who were involved?
• Middle-class professionals – doctors, scientists,
lecturers, teachers, clerics and politicians
• Fabians ,such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb (not
just a right-wing movement)
• H.G. Wells
• George Bernard Shaw
• Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain
• Many women members, including feminist
doctors e.g. Mary Scharlieb (1845-1930) and
Elizabeth Sloan Chesser (1878-1940) – particularly
interested in mothercraft
• Soft inheritance – transmission of natural (genetic) and
acquired characteristics (culture and habits) (Darwin)
• Hard inheritance – transmission of natural attributes only
(Galton) – traits and characteristics including intelligence,
beauty and susceptibility to illness hereditary (also ideas
influential in psychiatry e.g. Henry Maudsley)
• Positive eugenics: ‘consist in watching for the indications of
superior strains or races, and in favouring them that there
progeny shall outnumber and gradually replace that of the old
one’. e.g. selected marriage
• Negative eugenics: measures to dissuade the less fit from
breeding e.g. sterilisation
Dr Carlos Panton Blacker (1895-1975), leader of the Eugenics
Society from 1928: supporter of contraception; interested in
interaction of hard eugenics with environmental factors
Feeble mindedness
• Influential in 1913 Mental Deficiency Act (see
Mathew Thomson), which classified ‘idiots’ and
‘feebleminded’ separately from insane
• Act allowed for incarceration of feeble-minded –
associated with delinquency, promiscuity and
immorality.
• Believed to be hereditary and contributed to
social decline, poverty and unemployment
• 1930s interest switched to sterilisation as solution
(cheaper) but gained few supporters. Inspired
partly by Wood Report 1929 on mental deficiency
which found apparent increase in condition
(primary and secondary amentia)
• Sterilization Bill defeated 1931
EUGENICS BEFORE 2ND WORLD WAR
‘Legislatures as well as demagogues enacted
moderate eugenic measures, for the most part,
hoping these would lead to favourable
changes in the make-up of their populations.
More people - not necessarily the - ‘unfit’practised artificial birth control; more illegal
abortions - not necessarily of the ‘unfit’ probably took place. More mothers - not
necessarily the ‘fit’- raised more babies, and
more families were probably healthier. More
‘unfit’ people were segregated in institutions to
keep them from reproducing, and more were
sterilized than ever before - about 5,000
Scandinavians up to 1940.’
(James Moore, ‘The Fortunes of Eugenics’ (2004), p.282)
FURTHER MATERIAL/INFORMATION ON
EUGENICS……
Sterilisation of mentally defective
• ‘If it was said that sterilization was an affront to the
dignity of humanity we should listen – and agree.
But what dignity have the feeble in mind that
legislation can deprive them of it?... An intelligent
and healthy dog is more spiritually akin to man, has
more natural dignity than one of these. It is the
existence of the feebleminded which affronts
human dignity.’
Eugenics Review, 1928.
• Such views strongly opposed by emerging science
of genetics – attacked poor science of eugenics,
urged social reform, described working classes as
fitter because more of them!
Institutions of Eugenics
• 1904 Eugenics Record Office (Eugenics
Laboratory) established UCL
• Francis Galton (cousin of Charles Darwin)
and Karl Pearson – research into biometrics
• 1907 Eugenics Education Society founded
(Eugenics Society 1926) – education and
popularisation of eugenics
• Society asked to provide evidence for
government Royal Commissions e.g. on the
Care and Control of the Feebleminded (19048) and on Venereal Diseases (1913-16)
• Membership of Society never large – max
800, but had wider influence
Eugenics
• Has biological and ‘scientific roots’ – but also
impacts on society, economies, politics and
culture
• ‘More than anything else, eugenics was a
biological way of thinking about social,
economic, political and cultural change… it
gave scientific credibility… to… prejudices,
anxieties, and fears that… were prevalent
primarily… among the middle and upper
classes.’
Richard Soloway, Demography and Degeneration (1990) [see reading
list]
Strong interest in Britain in
some of pro-natalist
interventions in Germany
and Italy under Fascism,
and initially favoured
sterilisation of physically and
mentally ‘unfit’, but strongly
opposed to sterilisation of
Jews
Eugenics Review
Eugenics
• Has biological and ‘scientific roots’ – but also
impacts on society, economies, politics and
culture
• ‘More than anything else, eugenics was a
biological way of thinking about social,
economic, political and cultural change… it
gave scientific credibility… to… prejudices,
anxieties, and fears that… were prevalent
primarily… among the middle and upper
classes.’
Richard Soloway, Demography and Degeneration (1990) [see reading
list]
Divisions between Eugenicists
• Classic and reform eugencists
• See work on reading list by Daniel Kevles and
Richard Soloway
• Classic - heredity dominant and health and
welfare measures would encourage proliferation
of ‘unfit’
• Reform – wanted to disassociate from class bias
and suggest socially valuable qualities might be
found in all social groups. Supported
environmental improvement. Keen to cooperative
with other organisations.
• Dr Caleb Saleeby – strong belief in environment,
interested in infant welfare, impact of alcohol.
Also populariser of eugenic ideas
The End of Eugenics?
• Contraception excepted, eugenic programmes not
at first glance influential, though trickled down into
a good deal of lay literature and broader medical
and social welfare thinking
• Eugenics very, very complicated and cut across
left and right wing views (soft and hard/positive
and negative). Broadly speaking eugenics hostile
to environmental view of causes of poverty and
social problems, but some eugenicists favoured
social reform and tackling poverty. Eugenic view
shaped government policy up to WWII, thereafter
shift to more welfarist policies
• Decline of eugenics after WWII – yet continued to
influence social work (or at least ideas embedded).
Idea of ‘problem family’ prevails to today in
different forms.