Unnatural selection: Mothers, eugenic feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's regeneration narratives

American Quarterly

Volumn 55, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 61-88

  Seitler, Dana ^a  

^a WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949810402     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2003.0001     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. Anita Loos, "The Force of Heredity, and Nella: A Modern Fable with a Telling Moral for Eugenists," Vanity Fair (Feb. 1915): 42. All future references to the story are from this publication and page number
2. See Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989)
3. See, for example, Kelley Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin De Siècle (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996)
4. and Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1997)
5. The representations of a sanctified motherhood as either an imperiled or a prescriptive ideal is not new in the context of American history. However, I am arguing that the figure of the mother emerged with new meaning not only for the social world at this time but for white progressive feminists who could now imagine their value in a world increasingly laden with biological forms of social control. For different accounts of the figure of the mother in American culture see Stephanie Smith, Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and 19th-century American Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994)
6. E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (New York: Routledge, 1992)
7. and Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, "Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction" in Theorizing Feminism, ed. Anne Herrmann and Abigail Stewart (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994)
8. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, His Religion and Hers (1923; Westport, Connecticut: Hyperion Press, 1976), 86
9. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham & London: Duke Univ. Press, 1995), 202
10. Anne J. Lane, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 18-19
11. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: the Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987)
12. and Ann DuCille, Skin Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996)
13. Daylanne English, "W. E. B. DuBois's Family Crisis," American Literature 72 (June 2000): 296. Surprisingly, however, English tends to dismiss the value and impact eugenics had within feminist practices of the period, writing that eugenics only appealed to "a few female American intellectuals and activists" (294)
14. Louise Newman, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 8
15. For a study of how feminism and evolutionism intersected in the British context see Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995)
16. Theodore Roosevelt, "National Duties" in The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1901; St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1970), 280
17. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1600-1860) (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973)
18. and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman, OK: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 175-76
19. Gilman, Women and Economics (1898; New York: Prometheus Books. 1996), 181
20. Among the many accounts of these shifts and anxieties see in particular Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985)
21. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1986)
22. Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982)
23. and John Haller and Robin Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1974)
24. For a discussion of this campaign within the context of the birth control movement, see Margaret Jones, "Woman's Body, Worker's Right: Feminist Self-Fashioning and the Fight for Birth Control, 1898-1917," in Tim Armstrong, ed., American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique (New York: New York Univ. Press. 1996)
25. See Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1968)
26. and Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995)
27. For Gilman's own record of her eugenic activities, including her speeches on heredity and "Racial Unity" and her involvement with the American Eugenics Society, see Denise D. Knight, ed., The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Volume 2: 1890-1935 (Charlottesville, Va.: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1994)
28. Quoted in Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 90
29. Madeleine B. Stern, ed., The Victoria Woodhull Reader (Weston, Massachusetts: M & S Press, 1974), 39. See also "Stirpiculture; or, The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race" in the same volume
30. Gilman, Women and Economics, 295
31. Gilman, "A Suggestion on the Negro Problem," American Journal of Sociology 14 (July 1908), 78, 83
32. Gilman, With Her in Ourland, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), 120
33. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality" in The Foucault Effect, ed. Graham Birchell (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). For Foucault, the restructuring of power relations in modernity depended upon the family as a privileged site for the government of the biological population
34. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), vol. 2: 28
35. Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse" in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1990), 337
36. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wall-Paper," The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 3. Further references will be cited parenthetically by page number
37. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence (New York: Appleton & Co., 1907), vol. 1: 10
38. See also Alexander Chamberlain, The Child: a Study in the Evolution of Man (New York: Scribner's, 1907)
39. For more on Hall and Chamberlain's theories of childhood and recapitulation, see Bill Brown's argument on Crane's "savage boys" in The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and The Economies of Play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996)
40. Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 6
41. For my argument on degeneration narratives, see "Down on All Fours: Atavistic Perversions and the Science of Desire from Frank Norris to Djuna Barnes," American Literature (Sept. 2001)
42. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Man-Made World, Our Androcentric Culture (New York: Charlton, 1911), 179
43. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Crux (New York: Charlton Co., 1911). All future references will be from this edition and cited parenthetically by page number
44. An interesting addendum to this comparison is the fact that Owen Wister was diagnosed with neurasthenia by the physician S.W. Mitchell (infamous for his "rest cure"), as was Gilman, but Mitchell did not advise him to "rest" but rather to take a trip to the West for some exercise. In fact, while Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a critique of Mitchell's therapy, Wister wrote The Virginian in praise of it. See Barbara Will, "The Nervous Origins of the American Western," American Literature 70 (June 1998): 293-316
45. For a thorough account of the anxieties over syphilis in the U.S. see Alan Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the U.S. since 1880 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987)
46. See Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady (New York: Penguin, 1985)
47. and Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Routledge, 1991)
48. Priscilla Wald, "Cultures and Carriers: Typhoid Mary and the Science of Social Control," Social Text 52-53 (fall/winter 1997): 183
49. Wald, "Cultures and Carriers," 210
50. Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 5
51. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an Autobiography (1935; New York: Arno Press, 1972), 154
52. Also see Lois Magner, "Darwinism and the Woman Question" in Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Joanne Karpinski (New York: Maximilian, 1992)
53. Herbert Spencer, First Principles of a New System of Biology (New York: Appleton, 1864), 516
54. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers (1923; Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1976), v
55. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1914; New York: Pantheon, 1979), 84, 22, 87
56. Val Gough characterizes Herland's descriptions of its mothers as part of its "lesbian subtext" in which Gilman articulates "a lesbian-feminist vision of the nurturing and collective capacities of women." Gough perhaps too hastily translates Herland into a presentist political currency - of feminist sexual subversiveness - that places the text in an ideological context that elides the specificities of Gilman's project. Her descriptions can be read as "butch erotics," and her critique of heterosexuality resembles something subversive, from a perspective outside of the feminism of the period. See Val Gough, "Lesbians and Virgins: The New Motherhood in Herland," Anticipations: Essays in Early Science Fiction and its Precursors, ed. David Seed (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1995), 197
57. T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981)
58. See Bederman, 142-144
59. See also Gilman. The Crux, 90
60. See Amy Kaplan, "Manifest Domesticity," American Literature 70 (Sept. 1998), 581-606
61. and Jennifer S. Tuttle, "Rewriting the West Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Owen Wister, and the Sexual Politics of Neuresthenia," in The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Catherine Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando (Newark, Del.: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2000)
62. See Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997)