Lady Eugenist


by Victoria Woodhull


Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and Writings of Victoria Woodhull by Victoria Woodhull (1837-1927)

Description



During the last decades of her life, Victoria Woodhull claimed to be the first of either sex to promote eugenics throughout the United States and Great Britain. Even more surprising, she claimed to have been doing so in the early 1870s, three decades before the cause was taken up in earnest by Francis Galton, the eminent scientist that eugenists claim as their founder.

It's obvious why eugenists have adjusted their history. Francis Galton was the respectable, well-bred, well-educated cousin of Charles Darwin. Victoria Woodhull was a twice-divorced woman of uncertain breeding and limited education, a woman with a reputation for sexual and political radicalism. Unfortunately, historians have followed the eugenists and credited Galton rather than Woodhull.

This book investigates Woodhull's claim and presents evidence from her published speeches that she was right. She was speaking on eugenics to large audiences at least as early as early as 1871, and by the mid-1870s eugenics, which she called "stirpiculture" and "scientific propagation," formed a major part of speeches she was making across the United States and (after 1876) in Great Britain. By his own admission, Galton did not take up the cause until after 1900. This book includes one of her earliest speeches in favor of eugenics, newspaper reports of speeches from the 1870s, and five easily read facsimiles of speeches that until now were available only in a few research libraries in the world.

Even more important, what Woodhull said about eugenics appealed to the same two groups that would later support Margaret Sanger's birth control movement, wealthy and highly educated women. Her speeches and writings laid the eugenic foundation for the forced sterilization laws passed in over thirty states from 1907 on. When the U.S. Supreme Court declared such laws constitutional in 1927, the New York Times reported that Woodhull praised the decision and said she had "advocated that fifty years ago."

Author's Biography



Victoria Woodhull's life (1837-1927) was an impressive series of firsts. She was the first woman to run from U.S. President and, with her sister, the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street. But not included in her biographies or in the histories of eugenics is a startling fact. In the 1870s, she would be the first to promote eugenics, calling for a "humanitarian government" that would create a "perfected humanity" by breeding "perfect children." She was, as a London newspaper would put in it 1912, the "Lady Eugenist" and the "Introducer of the Movement to England."

From the Introduction


In both Europe and the United States, the nineteenth century was an exceptionally fertile time for ideas. For good and ill, all-encompassing schemes for social reorganization, such as nationalism and socialism, were nurtured until they grew strong--sadly, often strong enough to be dangerous, as the twentieth century would demonstrate.

One of those ideas was eugenics. The basic idea of eugenics, controlled breeding, has no inventor. Long before written history, people domesticated animals, selecting the most useful to parent the next generation. Cattle were chosen for meat or milk, chickens for eggs, horses for strength, and dogs for their eagerness to obey.
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In historical times and particularly under the influence of Christianity, however, there was an unwillingness to extend breeding to people. For all their power, Europe's feudal lords could not mate their strongest peasant lad with their sturdiest lass, nor could they forbid the weakest from marrying and parenthood. People, however poor, still bore the image of God, and marriage was a holy sacrament. Eugenists would even complain that Medieval Catholicism had been anti-eugenic, drawing the most talented into lives of celibacy.

Other societies were different. Plato's utopia, described in his Republic, was to be eugenic. Nearby Sparta actually practiced a ruthless form of eugenics, killing infants who seemed unlikely to become hardy warriors. Sparta demonstrates one problem with applying ideas that work with farm animals to people. With a chicken, you know what you want—eggs. But what do you want a human to be? Isaac Newton, born tiny and premature, would have been quickly discarded in Sparta, as would Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, both sickly children who grew up to become strong and talented leaders.

But there is a sense in which eugenics has a pioneer. Pioneering an idea is like exploration and discovery. In the strictest sense, the person who discovered America was the unknown person who first crossed the land bridge from Asia. Those who want to add to "discover America" an implicit "from Europe," get caught up in debates about dates and evidences. Where did the Norse settle? Did Irish monks come here? Did Phoenicians arrive before anyone else? Columbus is unique only in that he made his exploration well known. If his three ships had been forced to return, having found no land to the west, his reputation would have been ruined. So, in that sense and even though what he found wasn't what he was looking for, Columbus discovered America. He staked his reputation on land being there and was proved right openly and publicly. That's why the world was never the same after him. It wasn't changed by Norse or Irish explorers.

That's the sense in which this book suggests Victoria Woodhull pioneered eugenics, and it's the same sense she herself claimed. She wasn't the first to come up with the idea, or the first the first to write about it. She did not get a few people to live eugenically in the small Oneida community. But she may have been the first to stake her reputation on eugenics becoming a cause and speak often and widely on the topic. In that sense, she is the "Lady Eugenist" of this book's title, and everyone who came after, whether they admitted it or not, were her followers.

Table of Contents with Selected Quotes

1. Was Victoria Woodhull the First Eugenist?

Unfortunately, that's not the official line. Almost without exception, the story of eugenics as told by historians has favored well-born, well-to-do, well-educated men, mostly English. Perhaps deceived by eugenists, who found Woodhull's prior claim embarrassing, historians have neglected the role played by women, particularly American women such as Victoria Woodhull, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Margaret Sanger. While I disagree strongly with virtually every premise and practice of eugenics, I believe this silence is unfair. Woodhull wanted to be credited as a eugenic pioneer--perhaps even the eugenic pioneer--and, as this book will demonstrate, she earned that title.


2. Children--Their Rights and Privileges (1871)
As you read, notice what Woodhull is saying. Parents rights are "supposed," while those of the State are absolute. For her, both parent and child "belong to humanity" -- meaning the government. Her goal was not to free a few abused or neglected children from exceptionally bad parents. It was to have the government replace parents "fully one half " the time or more.

3. Press Notices (1869-1882, publ. 1890)
Notice the contrast between "Female Suffrage" being "of interest to many" and "raising society"--her broad eugenic scheme--being "of supreme moment to all." Make no mistake, Woodhull believed that her ideas about eugenics were more important than winning the vote for women. In a 1876 speech in New Jersey she went even further, a reporter writing that she, "declared that it was useless to discuss suffrage until the women of the country had raised up a better race of man."

4. The Garden of Eden (1875, publ. 1890)
Even if normal people were educated to believe in eugenics, so they would never mate with someone who was 'unfit,' that did not mean the 'unfit' would not defy popular attitudes and mate among themselves for much the same reason that some defy public opinion and commit crimes.

5. Stirpiculture (1888) includes "Some Thoughts about America"
Woodhull opened by comparing society to a building whose architect "corresponds to the Government." Those who suspect she did not believe in democracy are right. She admits that in the first sentence of "Humanitarian Government" (Chapter 6). She hinted here what she later said clearly, that the mass of the population who make up the building's foundation are "rotten and insecure." Later she pointed to a different building, one built "to incarcerate the insane, the idiots, the epileptics, the drunkards, the criminals." If animals, she wrote, displayed "such infirmities and propensities, we should soon exterminate them; and yet we have not thought it needful to take measures to eradicate them from the highest organism, man." That's the essence of eugenics, breeding people for certain traits much as plants and animals are bred.

6. Humanitarian Government (1890)
Woodhull was no fool. She knew that locking people away was expensive, so she has other, less costly techniques in mind. Remember that she believed most people were the products of three forces--religion, politics and society. She's dealt with religion by creating a new one to replace Christianity. She's dealt with politics by changing the laws and the court system to make it more expert-centered and scientific. Now she turns to the standards that a society sets, standards enforced by stigmatization as well as laws. "A humanitarian government," she wrote, "would stigmatize the marriages of the unfit as crimes; it would legislate to prevent the birth of a criminal rather that legislate to punish him after he is born."

7. The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit (1891)
This meant that major social problems, from poverty to crime and mental illness, were the result of both hereditary and environment, with no clear distinction between the two. That was why Woodhull warned about "depleting our workers and then allowing them in ignorance to breed." Tired parents meant tired children. She took that argument even further and warned that future generations would not retain their "superior qualities" if the better members of the present generation were "overtaxed, overburdened, and under the strain."
That was a dangerous argument because it claimed that burdening the healthy with the costs of caring for the 'unfit' would not only take idle pleasures from the lives of affluent taxpayers, but would create stresses that would turn at least some of the 'fit' into 'unfit.' Her hostility toward disabled children is particularly disturbing.

8. The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race (1893) includes "Efficacy of Punishments" (1892)
Even when Woodhull seemed to offer women "freedom of choice," it came with a nasty legal bite. The paragraph below follows one in which she criticized situations in which a woman was "legally married to a drunkard, an epileptic, or otherwise unfit individual." According to her, such "a woman perpetuates a crime if she continues to have children by such a husband." To avoid becoming a criminal, Woodhull expects that woman to divorce a man that, at least in the case of an epileptic, might be a congenial husband. In place of her husband, Woodhull offers an unlikely society where such women and their children aren't faced with poverty. She also slides quickly past the fact that a eugenic rationale for divorce would offer men an excuse to exchange an emotionally troubled wife for a less complicated and prettier one.


ISBN: 1-58742040-6 (paperback) 1-58742042-2 (hardback)
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Comments

This book is part of a series on the history of eugenics that includes G. K. Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils, one of the few books to criticize eugenics in the 1920s, as well as The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective, Margaret Sanger's 1922 birth control bestseller with 31 additional chapters to explain the coded language she used in her book.


Lady Eugenist has be followed by another Victoria Woodhull book, Free Lover: Sex and Marriage in the Early Speeches of Victoria Woodhull. That book will include the full text of her early, controversial speeches against legally enforced marriage. Contained within those speeches were her earliest ideas about eugenics, drawn from the radical utopia thinkers of mid-nineteenth century America.
For students and others in a hurry, most of these books are also available from Amazon.com and others in a downloadable Adobe PDF ebook format that has no restrictions on what can be printed.