‘People Talk a Lot of Nonsense about Heredity’: Mona Caird and Anti-Eugenic Feminism

Abstract

In the words of the late nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Sharp, Mona Caird’s opinions, though they were ‘met with acute hostility at the time, contributed a great deal to “altering the attitude of the public mind in its approach to and examination of [the woman question].”’³ Sharp dedicated her anthology of Victorian Women Poets to Caird, designating her ‘the most loyal and devoted advocate of the cause of woman’.⁴ I shall demonstrate in this essay the extent to which Caird exposed and opposed the repressive ideas which lay beneath the apparently emancipatory rhetoric of many of her feminist contemporaries.

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.²

Caird, The Great Wave (London: Wishart, 1931), 43.