Eugenics and the epidemic of motherhood: The politics of reproduction in American women's fiction of the 1920's and 1930's

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the gender-biased theories of the American eugenics movement of the 1920's and 1930's, and to prove that a strong, feminist opposition to that movement was carried out in numerous texts by American women fiction writers during those decades. While critics of the movement which tried to control and manipulate reproduction understood the dangers of eugenics' class and race biases, few, if any, aside from the fiction writers I examine, criticized the movement's fundamentally sexist principles and practices.; By examining works by Tillie Olsen, Edith Summers Kelley, Meridel Le Sueur, Fielding Burke, Nella Larsen, and Edith Wharton, I study the effects negative and positive eugenics (components of the movement which helped position it as a cure for the imagined "epidemic" of race suicide and degeneration) had on women, as well as the potential for women's resistance to the movement suggested in texts by these authors. The women writers I study conclude that while the eugenics movement gained power when its theories became a part of the dominant culture's thinking on reproduction, women's opposition and resistance to efforts to control reproduction often had the potential to be as powerful. Their discussion of these issues becomes part of the cultural dialogue concerning the injustices of the eugenic movement's theories and practices. In this dissertation I conclude that through their writing these women intervene in a specific historical moment, offering the beginnings of a counter-discourse for women oppressed by eugenics, suggesting ways that gender can be read as socially constructed, rather than biologically determined.