Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Regeneration Narratives

Abstract

"Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Regeneration Narratives" historicizes and theorizes the complexities of fin-de-siecle "women's literature"--fiction by and about women that highlights and explores the social relations of gender. Attending especially to the involvement of this literature in the textual mediation of scientific discourse, I ask: if some of the greatest anxieties over cultural progress or degeneration in this period were organized around theories of heredity, what kinds of pressures, urgencies, or appeals were placed on motherhood? How did women-authored narratives react to or participate in the generation of these appeals? Charlotte Perkins Gilman's fiction exemplifies a mode of reaction and participation I call "eugenic feminism": the use of eugenics for a feminist agenda articulated on behalf of perceived socio-sexual problems. Gilman deploys this agenda to construct "regeneration narratives" that respond to fears of degeneration by foregrounding the cultural primacy of women and their reproductive status. In so doing, she helped instantiate and inform a new version of liberal humanism in which the mother acts as ideal civic progenitor. By representing eugenic ideology as the source of this ideal, she racializes the language of feminism. Thus her regulatory fictions of sexual responsibility operate as both fantasies of white female political agency and norms that manage female sexuality.

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