Search Results

This chapter focuses on economist and sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross, and his sociological theory of race suicide and social control. It examines the main ideas of Ross's theory, particularly his argument that social change must be controlled by using the rural family as a tool. The chapter also discusses Ross's emphasis on the regulation of birthrates—especially the need to raise the birthrate among “superior”white women—as a matter of controlling social order in the image of a natural order, and how his nostalgic projection of the rural family was sentimentally invoked as the “traditional American family.” Alarmed by the changes brought about by immigration on the whole fabric of society, Ross called for massive social reform and invoked Emile Durkheim's work on suicide as an example of a natural law in sociology. He also idealized the farm and railed against “the deteriorating influences of the city and factory.” The chapter elaborates on Ross's vision of the ideal American and looks at Theodore Roosevelt's role in bringing the issue of race suicide to the American public.

Chapter One examines the efforts of Frederick L. Hoffman -a statistician with Prudential Life Insurance-to chart African American proletarianization through actuarial science in turn of the century America. In works such as “Vital Statistics of the Negro” (1892) and the seminal “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro” (1896), Hoffman provided a statistical rationale for elite anxieties regarding blacks transition from bonded to contract labor. Hoffman charted this transition through the respective metrics of crime, race mixing and the broadly defined ‘vital capacity’ (a measure of respiratory health). With the rise of corporate industrial insurance the metric of health –or lack thereof- became a key commodity of progressive era political economy. Positing mortality as the primary marker of racial health, actuaries conflated evolutionary theory and industrial management to quantify and monetize shifts in political economy through the rhetoric of race suicide. Hoffman’s narratives of race suicide reconstituted the diseased and dying black body as a cautionary tale to the perils of black advancement. The desire to maintain the hierarchies of white supremacy amidst the forces of rapid industrialization, urbanization and mass culture made the figure of the ‘vanishing Negro’ an imperative of turn of the century American political economy.

This chapter addresses the shift in feminist thought away from the idealization of maternity in the late nineteenth century, examining white women’s growing interest in controlling reproduction. Considering the influence of Free Love radicalism and the factors that ultimately led to eugenic feminism, this chapter recovers an anti-natalist strain in first-wave feminist thought. A reading of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) in light of sociological discourses decrying New England’s diminished birthrate illuminates the conflicting demands of feminism and the reproductive imperative of white nationalism in Roosevelt’s America.

Chapter three analyzes how various thinkers applied evolutionary theory to turn-of-the-twentieth century debates about motherhood. Opponents of women’s advancement typically claimed that women’s foremost function was to bear and raise children; any intellectual or professional endeavors detracted from this sacred duty and imperiled the human race. These arguments were often couched in evolutionary discourse, as exemplified by the much-studied “Race Suicide” panic of the early 1900s. Because of the flexibility of Darwinian discourse, however, evolutionary theory also buttressed a feminist redefinition of motherhood– promoted by Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others—which claimed, in part, that it was unnatural for women to be confined to domestic tasks because female domesticity had no precedent in the animal kingdom. Focusing on feminist applications of animal-human kinship, this chapter examines the turn-of-the-century vogue for fit pregnancy and demands for the reapportionment of domestic duties to enable mothers to work outside the home.

The family is the institution whose future is perhaps the most regularly described as being in jeopardy in America. Contemporary worries about the threat to the normative family, and to its place as the cornerstone of the nation, have parallels in the late nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century alarm over women's declining fertility and the subsequent interventions to boost childbearing levels. And much as in the late 1800s, contemporary reproductive politics is characterized by race- and class-specific concerns. Early twentieth-century anxiety about declining fertility was focused on the declining fertility of white, middle-class women and the concomitant rise in immigration from southern and eastern Europe. These fears promoted a campaign against “race suicide.” More recent concerns about issues such as delayed marriage and childbearing, increased infertility, and the lack of “adoptable” babies also are clearly focused on the reproduction of white, middle-class families.

From Mary Elizabeth Lease's maternalist agenda and George H. Maxwell's homecroft movement, to Edward Alsworth Ross's sociological theory of race suicide and social control, Florence Sherbon's eugenics campaign for “fitter families” and Theodore Roosevelt's advocacy of country life and the conservation of race, American pronatalism appealed to the nostalgic ideal of the farmer and the redemptive value of the rural family. This chapter explores the ideological and cultural ideals that shaped pronatalism in the United States between the 1890s and the 1930s. It also discusses the articulation of the mother and the home in the campaign for agrarianism, and in invoking the modernist promise of reform, racism, and reproduction.