McLaren, Angus

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 425context of heterosexual romance. Azoulay’s arguments are thought-provoking, and the book should be required reading for social historians of the modern period; but it needs to be read in tandem with works that dissect the patriarchal laws, values and beliefs that structured both romance and marriage.Lori ChambersLakehead University BASHFORD, Alison, and Philippa LEVINE, eds., – The Oxford Handbook of The History of Eugenics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 586.“Don’t we already know everything there is to know about eugenics?” A senior profes-sor of Canadian history posed me this barbed question at a late 1980s conference on the history of medicine. I had just spoken about the sterilization of the feeble-minded in Brit-ish Columbia. That memory makes it all the more enjoyable to laud the appearance of The Oxford Handbook of The History of Eugenics, an impressive survey which, in thirty-one chapters amounting to close to six hundred pages, makes it clear that three decades ago the scholarly interest in eugenics—far from having been exhausted—was just taking off. The book consists of two parts. Part One examines key transnational themes, including such issues as eugenics’ relationship to Darwinism, colonialism, race, genetics, fertility control, psychiatry, genocide, and sexuality. Part Two is devoted to national histories of eugenics with chapters on the usual suspects—Britain, the United States, Canada, and Germany; the less familiar histories of Sweden, Italy, and Russia; the colonial situation—in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the French and Dutch empires; and the experiences of a number of non-European states—China, Japan, Iran, Israel, and Brazil.Most readers will no doubt know the story of eugenics beginning with Francis Galton countering the nineteenth-century belief in the “survival of the fittest.” Thanks, he claimed, to medical interventions hordes of sickly children who should have perished, survived and went on to reproduce. Their tainted heredity manifested itself in alcoholism, criminal-ity, and madness. Meanwhile under the pressure of paying for the increasingly expensive trappings of gentility, the healthy upper classes who should have produced large broods, reduced their fertility. Believing that human traits were innate and could not be influenced by education or environment, Galton held that some lives were more valuable than others. By this evaluative logic quality counted more than quantity. One thus moved from Darwin’s evolution by natural selection to Galton’s plea for artificial selection to improve human pop-ulations. He held that if the fit could not be bribed into reproducing one would have to limit the fertility of the unfit. The most extreme eugenicists envisaged the forced abortion and sterilization of the inferior, legal polygamy for “superior” men, compulsory reproduction of healthy females, social segregation and confinement of defectives, and finally euthanasia. Those who persisted in producing inferior offspring were to be regarded as enemies of the state. A number of writers have portrayed the Nazis as following such ideas to their logical conclusion—the extermination of those deemed racial threats.The great value of this text is that its contributors provide succinct revisions of many of the common accounts of eugenics. Since eugenics was initially a manifestation of 426 Histoire sociale / Social Historyupper-class anxieties, early investigators located eugenics on the political right, but sev-eral chapters note that many progressives and liberals were drawn to what they regarded as a modernizing, future-oriented, scientific creed which presented social issues as bio-logical problems that required the planning, selecting, and streamlining of the popula-tion. In China those seeking the nation’s regeneration embraced eugenics. In India it manifested itself in societies led by nationalist feminists advocating birth control. In Scandinavia it was implicated in the welfare system. In ethnically diverse Eastern Europe nationalists took it up as a tool to be employed in state building. In the Soviet Union it at first flourished, linked to the medicalization of society, but eventually fell under the onslaught of the adherents of Marxism and Lamarckism.Given different contexts, different styles of eugenics emerged. Protestant nations like the United States and Germany were the most likely to institute eugenic policies such as sterilizations. In Catholic regions the church’s opposition was crucial though not so much directed at eugenicists’ ends as at the means they employed. Moreover several con-tributors stress that in much of the world latter day Larmarkians advanced a pro-natalist “social eugenics” that preached the importance of sanitary improvements.Gender necessarily figured centrally in the discussion of reproduction. Women were well represented in eugenics societies that called for the policing of some women while allowing others to exploit race concerns to win their own emancipation. Susanne Klau-sen and Alison Bashford point out that birth controllers like Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger actually believed the eugenic arguments they used to defend the giving of contra-ceptives to poor women. Curiously enough little has been written about the eugenicists’ views on masculinity. In her insightful chapter Alexandra Minna Sterns tellingly argues that eugenics obviously responded to men’s preoccupation with fears of flagging virility.Eugenicists talked repeatedly about the threat of “race suicide,” but what did they mean by “race”? In South Africa, Saul Dubow reports, eugenic ideas never played a central role in white ideology. As was initially the case in the American south, eugen-icists regarded poor whites—not Blacks—as the real racial threat. And what of anti-Semitism? Raphael Falk notes that eugenicists and anti-Semitism were not necessarily related. Indeed, influenced as they were by German race theorists, Zionists launched a eugenic campaign to create a new, muscular people. In Germany concerns for race hygiene, ultimately resulted in 375,000 sterilizations, but Paul Weindling notes, eugenics was not fixated on the Jews, indeed Jewish doctors were active in the early years of the Racial Hygiene Society. Was there a drift from sterilizations to euthanasia to genocide? A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone argue that the Nazis targeted more than the Jews, that they were always more racist than eugenic. Genocidal politics simply fed on eugenics which provided a vocabulary to justify racism.If this book has a weakness it is that it does not address the argument advanced by the proponents of disability history that we know much about the eugenicists and should now turn to those whom they castigated as threats to the race. The editors should be applauded, however, for so successfully accomplishing what they set out to do. Perhaps the main impression left by a reading of this important text is the elasticity of the defini-tion of eugenics. While Stephen Garton warns of the danger of blurring the lines which often separated its pessimistic agenda from that of more progressive social movements, some contributors construe almost any concern for health and fitness as eugenic. All Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 427agree, however, that with the availability today of gene testing, prenatal screening, selec-tive abortion, and surrogacy an understanding of eugenics is more necessary than ever.Angus McLarenUniversity of VictoriaBÉLANGER, Damien-Claude – Prejudice and Pride: Canadian Intellectuals Confront the United States, 1891-1945. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Pp. 322.George Parkin Grant, author of Lament for a Nation (1965), once observed that “to think of the U.S. is to think of ourselves – almost” (p. 14). Damien-Claude Bélanger, a historian at the University of Ottawa, largely agrees with that insight. In his review of the debate among Canadian intellectuals over the meaning and significance of thought, life, and culture in the United States, Bélanger asserts that the relationship between the United States and Canada is “existential” for Canadians: “it is bound up with issues related to Canadian identity and distinctiveness and to Canada’s place in the world” (p. 217). Other scholars, like J. A. Granatstein (1996) have examined Canadian atti-tu des toward the United States, emphasizing its strong anti-American tone. Scholars like Granatstein saw anti-Americanism both as an integral part of Canadian nationalism and as a ploy by English-speaking Canadian elites to uphold their political and cultural dominance. Whereas Bélanger accepts the prevailing historiography on anti-American-ism in Canadian thought, he also believes that scholars have taken a restricted approach to the issue. In this comprehensive study, he examines the intellectual discourse of both English and French Canadian thinkers. Bélanger does not limit himself to analyzing the thought of nationalists and non-nationalists. Rather he explores debate across the Canadian political spectrum—left, right, and center. Most important, he argues that Canadian analyses of U.S. life and U.S. foreign and commercial policy revealed more than just attitudes about Canadian nationalism. When they thought and wrote about the United States, Canadian intellectuals were expressing their hopes and fears about change, progress, and “modernity.”In defending his thesis, Bélanger studied a corpus of over 500 texts, both fiction and non-fiction. In a useful appendix, he lists the works in chronological order. The author chose to start his analysis in 1891, because he believed the federal election of that year revolved around anti-Americanism. In a pattern that would be often repeated, Conserva-tives used anti-American rhetoric to attack their Liberal opponents. In 1891, also, God-win Smith published his seminal Canada and the Canadian Question, challenging the very being of the nation. The military and diplomatic alliances that developed between the United States and Canada during the world wars inevitably led Canadian intellectuals to reassess their attitudes toward their southern neighbor. Bélanger stops in 1945, because he reasons that in the postwar period increasingly self-confident Canadian intellectuals no longer saw the imperial United States as a modern, progressive nation. In any case, Canada had become urban, industrial, and materialistic, and, through immigration, it had developed a growing, multi-cultural population. The similarities between Canadian and U.S. life and culture easily outstripped their differences.

BASHFORD, Alison, and Philippa LEVINE (eds.) – The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics

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BASHFORD, Alison, and Philippa LEVINE (eds.) – The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)