For American women in the early twentieth century, marriage was a dangerous affair.
Upon her marriage, a woman’s civic and social identity became subsumed in her husband’s. A wife was expected to be subservient in the home and in the marital bed. If a husband became abusive, indifferent, or otherwise lackluster, she had little recourse. Divorces were rare, difficult to obtain, and stigmatized.
But broad social changes were afoot. The middle-class “True Woman” of the Victorian Era—passive, pious, frail, and domestic—was facing challenges from the Progressive Era “New Woman”—passionate, opinionated, independent, and well-educated. The New Woman studied in university, worked before marriage and occasionally after, and didn’t hesitate to tackle some of the more difficult and uncomfortable marital and reproductive matters of the time.
In this context, the field of eugenics emerged as a lens through which white middle-class women could more deeply examine these issues and solve the “marriage problem.” As a 1909 Current Literature article declared, “Marriage is, essentially, a science.” And indeed, eugenists advised women to learn all they could about the scientific basis of marriage, and then put the facts into practice in life’s laboratory. If women carefully studied eugenics, they could determine with the greatest accuracy which man to marry to ensure a happy future.
Related on the SLP
Dr. Norman Barnesby counseled that alcoholism was either a symptom or a cause of natural inferiority. Women may idealize marring an alcoholic man to reform him, but these innately hopeless causes would produce a “wrecked life and a dreary home.” With statements like these, eugenists warned women that despite their hopes that the men they marry will abandon their damaging habits, love cannot eliminate inborn qualities.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Forgotten Stories of the Eugenic Age #2: Eugenics, Love, and the Marriage Problem
