The 'Perfect Contraceptive': Eugenics and Birth Control Research in Britain and America in the Interwar Years

Abstract

In recent years, the study of eugenics and birth control, particularly in Britain and America, has become something of a scholarly industry. The former subject has tended to preoccupy more students of British history than has the latter, while just the opposite had been true of students of American history. On rare occasions, scholars have spanned the Atlantic and in the case of eugenics at least, offered important comparative insights. Although some historians of the birth control movements in both countries have noted the eugenic dimension in the early campaign for family planning, the importance of the close, often uncomfortable relationship between the two has by no means been fully recognized.' The birth control movement for the most part has been depicted as an ultimately successful, heroic struggle of far-sighted reformers to overcome the ignorance, prudery, obscurantism, religious bigotry and moral hypocrisy of the dominant reactionary forces in their respective societies. Eugenics, by contrast, has been seen not only as a failure broadly associated with many of these reactionary elements, but as fashioned by the nazis, a horrific disaster that in retrospect seemed the inevitable outcome of pseudo-scientific, hereditarian determinism run wild. It is a legacy that after the second world war led to the virtual exclusion of 'eugenics' from the lexicon of scientific social reform, where it had played an important role in the first half of the twentieth century. But it was also largely expunged as a painful embarrassment from the historical memory of the triumphant birth control movement where its role and support in both Britain and America was far

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