Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938 / Edition 1

by Laura L. Lovett

Overview

Through nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, family, and the home, influential leaders in early twentieth-century America constructed and legitimated a range of reforms that promoted human reproduction. Their pronatalism emerged from a modernist conviction that reproduction and population could be regulated. European countries sought to regulate or encourage reproduction through legislation; America, by contrast, fostered ideological and cultural ideas of pronatalism through what Laura Lovett calls "nostalgic modernism," which romanticized agrarianism and promoted scientific racism and eugenics.

Lovett looks closely at the ideologies of five influential American figures: Mary Lease's maternalist agenda, Florence Sherbon's eugenic "fitter families" campaign, George Maxwell's "homecroft" movement of land reclamation and home building, Theodore Roosevelt's campaign for conservation and country life, and Edward Ross's sociological theory of race suicide and social control. Demonstrating the historical circumstances that linked agrarianism, racism, and pronatalism, Lovett shows how reproductive conformity was manufactured, how it was promoted, and why it was coercive. In addition to contributing to scholarship in American history, gender studies, rural studies, and environmental history, Lovett's study sheds light on the rhetoric of "family values" that has regained currency in recent years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807858035
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	04/23/2007
Series:	Gender and American Culture
Edition description:	1
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Laura Lovett is assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     vii
Nostalgia, Modernism, and the Family Ideal     1
New Occasions Teach New Duties: Mary Elizabeth Lease's Maternalist Agenda     17
Reclaiming the Home: George H. Maxwell and the Homecroft Movement     45
The Political Economy of Sex: Edward A. Ross and Race Suicide     77
Men As Trees Walking: Theodore Roosevelt and the Conservation of the Race     109
Fitter Families for Future Firesides: Florence Sherbon and Popular Eugenics     131
American Pronatalism     163
Notes     173
Bibliography     207
Index     229

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Conceiving the Future puts the history of reproductive regulation on the map, illuminating the Progressive Era marriage of agrarian ideology with scientism in the name of a 'better' (white) race and stronger nation. Lovett's finely grained and well-researched case studies represent the best of a new turn to intellectual portraiture.—Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara

Editorial Reviews

A useful complement to recent studies. . . . Contributes significantly to the further unraveling of . . . tenuous and slippery connections.—The Journal of American History



A thoughtful and probing book that backdates the emergence of pronationalism in the United States to the late nineteenth century and exposes intersections of nostalgia, eugenics, motherhood, and the idealization of the white frontier family from the 1890s to the 1930s. . . . A nicely textured analysis.—ISIS



A richly detailed, well-organized, and thoroughly researched narrative analyzing how perceptions about rural America, gender, race, and the family shaped pronatalist public policy around the turn of the twentieth century.—New England Quarterly



Touches on several different fields of American historical scholarship—women's history, history of children and the family, rural history, environmental history, labor history, history of science, and history of the West. Its method, however, is solidly grounded in the history of ideas.—Journal of Interdisciplinary History



Readers of this imaginative book will see many issues in a fresh light. They may be inspired to think in new ways about the connections between Americans' environmentalism, their celebration of the family, and their anxieties about women's roles outside the home.—Kansas History



This eclectic mix of major and minor players and familiar and unfamiliar reform efforts demonstrates the ubiquity of pronatalist thought and its ideological flexibility.—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society



Lovett will surely help persuade social scientists of the joys and ironies of cultural history.—PDR



Lovett offers incisive intellectual portraits and a challenging analysis of how gender and race informed the dynamic of residual agrarianism and emergent scientific and governmental regulation in the Populist and Progressive eras.—H-Net Reviews



A thoughtful and original approach to understanding the power of pronatalism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture.—Journal of Social History

From the Publisher