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Neo-Malthusians, Eugenists, and the Declining Birth-Rate in England, 1900-1918*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Richard Allen Soloway
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Extract

Recent studies of the social history of birth control in America have noted the importance of eugenics in securing the acceptance of family planning between the two world wars. Similarly in England the endorsement of contraception as a method of “race improvement” by eugenists in the scientific, medical, academic and ecclesiastical communities greatly enhanced the credence and respectability of the birth control movement. In the anti-racist, genetically more sophisticated climate since the Second World War it is often forgotten how pervasive eugenic assumptions about human inheritance were in learned and socially elevated circles in the early twentieth century. Belief in the inheritability of myriad physical, psychological and behavioral characteristics, identifiable, even quantifiable, in particular ethnic groups and social classes was reinforced by expert scientific testimony, and, perhaps equally important, middle and upper class prejudices.

Birth control leaders, whose respectability was always in some doubt, were for the most part no exception and readily mingled with the estimable worthies who adorned the ranks of the elitist Eugenics Education Society founded in 1907. Several officers of the old Malthusian League, including its last president, Charles Vickery Drysdale, and his wife, Bessie, were early if troublesome recruits to the Society, while Marie Stopes, the most dynamic promoter of birth control in England in the inter-war years, joined in 1912, and eventually became a Life Fellow who left the organization a financial legacy, her famous clinic and much of her library, upon her death in 1958.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , Fall 1978 , pp. 264 - 286
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1978

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Footnotes

*

A version of this paper was presented at the Joint Session of the Conference on British Studies and the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Dallas, Texas, 1977.

References

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28 For the origins of the Malthusian League and its basic precepts see Ledbetter, A history of the Malthusian League, Chape. 1-3.

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34 Ibid., no. 2 (March, 1879): 16; no. 4 (May, 1879): 26-27; no. 19 (Aug. 1880): 146. See also The Queen v. Chartes Bradlaugh and Annie Besant (2nd ed.; London, 1888), pp. 96–99Google Scholar.

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47 Although Alice Vickery Drysdale assumed the presidency of the League upon her husband's death in 1907 the organization was dominated by her son and daughter-in-law. C.V. Drysdale formally became president in 1921 when ill health forced his aged mother to resign.

48 Wells, who joined in 1914 and was persuaded to become a vice-president in 1915, threatened to resign two years later when the Drysdales' condemnation of socialists and militant trade unionists reached new levels of invective. See The Malthusian, XLI, no. 6 (June, 1917): 43–44Google Scholar.

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81 The rediscovery of Gregor Mendel at the opening of the twentieth century and the promulgation of his theories by William Bateson and others paralleled the rise of biometrics, and led to bitter controversy within the eugenics movement over the mechanisms of heredity. Though the Eugenics Education Society tended to side with Pearson, Galton and the biometricians, the Mendelian geneticists, had already made important inroads before the war and were much more influential after it.

82 The New Generation, III, no. 2 (Feb. 1924): 27Google Scholar.

83 C.B.S. Hodson to Marie Stopes, Dec. 11, 1923, Stopes Papers, The British Library, Add. MSS. 58644. Hodson was Secretary of the Eugenics Education Society.

84 The first birth control clinic in Great Britain was established in March, 1921 by Marie Stopes and her husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe. The Malthusian League followed with its own clinic later in the year. The total number of clinics established in the 1920s never exceeded seventeen. For the Eugenics Education Society's growing interest in them see Martyn, Edith How, The Birth Control Movement in England (London, 1930), p. 22.Google Scholar Also, Eugenics Society, Memorandum to Medical Officers and Superintendents. Birth Control Clinics in Stopes Papers, B.L., Add. MSS. 58644.