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Race Motherhood

Moral Eugenics vs Progressive Eugenics, 1880–1920

  • Chapter
Maternal Instincts

Abstract

Late-Victorian England was haunted by fears of degeneration. The nation’s flagging industrial sector, its urban poverty, and its disastrous performance in the Boer War often struck commentators as obvious signs of national and racial decay. In a post-Darwinian world, England’s apparent decline was assumed to be essentially biological. Many believed that the nation had entered a downward spiral of reverse evolution, which was manifesting itself in fin-de-siècle moral degeneration, insanity, disease, and sterility.1 Public-health reform and social-welfare policies only addressed the symptoms of degeneration. To get to the root of the problem, it was necessary to confront heredity and natural selection, so that the choice of one’s sexual partner became crucial to the nation’s future. Eugenics ‘the supposed science of selective breeding’, the birth-control movement, and social-purity campaigns against prostitution and venereal disease all sought to arrest a perceived national decline through a more rigorous control of human reproduction. Maternal sexuality lay at the heart of these concerns.2

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Authors
  1. George Robb
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Southwest Texas State University, USA

    Claudia Nelson (Associate Professor of English) (Associate Professor of English)

  2. Honors College, Louisiana State University, USA

    Ann Sumner Holmes (Instructor) (Instructor)

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© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Robb, G. (1997). Race Motherhood. In: Nelson, C., Holmes, A.S. (eds) Maternal Instincts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14534-8_4

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