Note, Eugenic Feminism: Mental Hygiene, the Women's Movement, and the Campaign for Eugenic Legal Reform, 1900-1935

It is well for every woman, however, to think this matter through and to realize that any women’s movement that is correlated with sterility is doomed to fail and annihilation. What shall it profit us eugenically to have women delve in laboratories, or search the heavens, or rule the nations, if the world is to be peopled by scrubwomen and peasants? – Anna M. Blount, Eugenics, in Woman and the Larger Citizenship, 2847, 2904-05 (Shailer Mathews ed., 1913).Part I of this article examines the evolution of eugenic thought and policy in the United States between 1880 and 1935, and uses it to illustrate the increasing tension between eugenic theory and law and the arguments of eugenic feminists. Part II completes this illustration by considering three of the most important feminist reformers, Victoria Woodhull, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Margaret Sanger, and their treatment of eugenic science. Studying the work of these three feminists helps explain the creation, evolution, and decline of eugenic feminism. Finally, Part III concludes by considering the reasons for eugenic feminism’s decline and the contradictions inherent in the movement.