Bridget Brooklyn explores the historical relationships between eugenics and feminist movements in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Australia.

From the time of the suffrage campaigns, many feminist claims to equality drew on the essentialist beliefs enshrined in ‘separate spheres’ ideology. They argued that women’s innate capacity for nurturance entitled them to equal citizenship, a position now described by historians as ‘maternalist feminism’. In early twentieth-century Australia, when white women first obtained the vote in the newly federated nation, maternalist feminists argued that women’s labour in raising and caring for children should be acknowledged as work. They also asserted that women’s capacity for nurturance would improve public life.

Pursuit of this goal of ‘maternal citizenship’ could be manifested in a variety of ways, and by radical and conservative feminists alike. Some harnessed women’s maternal capacities to campaign for parliamentary representation, while others drew attention to the abuse and neglect of Indigenous women.

The rise of maternalist feminism coincided with the widespread belief that all kinds of human traits were determined by heredity, and that is where eugenics comes in.  Putting it into a tiny nutshell, eugenics built on Darwin’s theory of natural selection by seeking to ‘improve’ human beings. Exactly what constituted ‘improvement’, and how to implement it, reflects the complexity of eugenics – what noted historian of eugenics, Diane B. Paul, calls ‘this protean concept’.  This blog explores some of the connections between feminist goals of ‘maternal citizenship’ and the eugenic measures that many of them espoused.

Eugenics and Feminism

Eugenicists applied the descriptors ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ to a variety of manifestations, ranging from intellectual disability to medical conditions such as epilepsy, to addictions such as alcoholism and even to sexual minorities. They were equally divergent in the remedies they espoused. Early eugenicists, such as Francis Galton (who coined the term) adopted a ‘hereditarian’ approach that saw all human characteristics as genetically inherited, and only manageable through selective breeding. At the other end of the spectrum, ‘environmental’ eugenics emphasised symptoms and causes that could be altered, frequently offering public health explanations, and remedies, for lack of ‘fitness’. A beneficial environment could ameliorate symptoms such as poor health or learning difficulties. If you had cereal with soymilk, or peanut butter on toast, for breakfast this morning, you will have consumed at least one invention of a famous advocate of eugenics.  

A useful guide to how scientists at the time perceived it can be found in an editorial published in the leading scientific journal, Nature, in 1904. Despite widespread acceptance of the desirability of eugenics, this editorial indicates how much was unclear about its goals, and attempts to clarify them in simple terms: “The essentials of eugenics may … be easily defined. All would agree that it was [sic] better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well fitted than ill fitted for their part in life.”  

Nowadays, the status of eugenics as a ‘science’ is invariably rendered in scare quotes, yet it dominated much leading medical and scientific opinion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has been associated with anti-feminist thinking, yet the close association of eugenic thought with ideas about motherhood and maternal and child health meant that many feminists embraced eugenics in some way.

From the second half of the nineteenth century, eugenic principles were applied both for and against feminism. Their eugenic solutions were varied in type and intensity and ran the gamut of environmental and hereditarian remedies. Eugenicists opposed to feminists’ increased demands for access to tertiary education thought that too much education ruined women’s childbearing capacity, while feminists argued that educated women made the best mothers.

Mary Booth: Feminist and Eugenics Advocate

Like maternalist feminists, eugenicists could be widely divergent. They were radicals and conservatives, purity crusaders and free love advocates, feminists and anti-feminists, racists and non-racists. Eugenics attracted many in the Australian medical profession, such as Dr Mary Booth (1869–1956), who practised as a physician between 1900 and 1913. She specialised in child health and published several works in which she discusses eugenics, particularly anthropometry.

Booth was a political conservative and a feminist. She was acquainted with notable members of the suffrage movement and it is likely that she played an active part in suffrage campaigns. Jill Roe lists her post-suffrage feminist achievements as including participation in founding the Women’s Club in 1901 and her role as vice-president of the NSW National Council of Women. Although not always overtly maternalist in her feminism, Booth saw women’s domain as the home. Like other feminists of her generation, she applied a domestic metaphor to the House, bringing into parliamentary politics the feminine attributes of nurturance and promotion of public health.

When two broad constellations of values come together, sometimes there will be contradictions, and this is certainly true of Mary Booth. Her feminism was sometimes at odds with her eugenic concerns about the effect of education on women’s childbearing capacity. She was an admirer of the New Zealand child health specialist (Sir) Frederic Truby King, who opposed women’s education on eugenic grounds. Accordingly, Booth came to believe that women who pursued a career that entailed years of education jeopardised their most important role – that of bringing forth healthy babies.

The message here was that Australia’s white population needed to increase in both number and vigour to resist possible invasion by our Asian neighbours, which many Australians believed was imminent. In a 1909 publication, Booth denounced birth control as:

“the selfishness that cannot resist patented facilities and perverted knowledge to avoid parenthood, without any conception of the significance of a declining birthrate in sapping the moral and material strength of the nation.”

Even considering that the feminism of the early twentieth century was very different from feminism today, Booth’s pronatalism was very hardline. Then, as now, the principle of women’s autonomy was embedded in feminism. Laying its claims on gendered notions about women’s superior capacity for nurturance, maternalist feminism nevertheless insisted that women should be able to choose how to apply that capacity. Booth’s imperative seems to fly in the face of this principle. Her position is even more difficult to fathom when we consider her life trajectory as a single, childless, professional woman.

We can only speculate about how Booth reconciled the contradiction between her eugenic advocacy and her career choices. While the contradiction seems obvious to us, perhaps she found a way to accommodate both her medical and her feminist ideas. That Booth continued to pursue feminist goals throughout her life suggests that she did not abandon feminism. She might have thought that her life as a professional woman had come to her by her talent, or by lack of success in finding a marriage partner, freeing her of any moral burden to reproduce and giving her the liberty to make assertions about married women’s obligations.

Eugenics, Feminism, Population and Race

The coming together of maternalist feminism and eugenic thinking meant that eugenic arguments could be applied both for and against feminism, particularly when racial anxieties were part of the mix. The life and work of Dr Mary Booth demonstrates how, within the broad reach of post-suffrage maternalist feminism, ideas about equality, health and race jostled with each other in complicated, diverse – and sometimes even contradictory – ways.

Thankfully, population size is generally no longer linked to racial anxieties. We might say, though, that population anxieties have their recent equivalent in panic about the current decline in Australia’s birthrate. But as with anxieties of the past, these fears present a simple picture of a complicated reality, as pointed out in an article by Edith Gray of the Australian National University. Despite the eventual decline of both eugenics and the pronatalist imperative of exhorting women to have more babies, the fundamental feminist principle of the right to determine family size still faces challenges.

Bridget Brooklyn is a lecturer in History and Philosophical Inquiry in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University. Her research interests include late nineteenth and twentieth-century Australian social and political history, particularly feminist political history. She is currently researching conservative feminist activity in early twentieth-century Australia. Her article on eugenics and feminism appeared in Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, no. 30 (2024). Other recent publications include (with Alison M. Downham Moore), ‘Review Essay on Global and World Histories of Feminism and Gender Struggle’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, no. 29 (2023), and Australia on the World Stage: History, Politics, and International Relations, edited by Bridget Brooklyn, Benjamin T. Jones and Bec Strating, (Oxon: Routledge, 2023).

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