Date of Award
Spring 5-12-2024
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (A.B.)
Restricted/Unrestricted
Restricted = WashU Only
Abstract
In recent years, growing scholarship has produced a great body of work on eugenics — race betterment theory — and its prominent role in American political and social ideology at the turn of the twentieth century. Less scholarship, however, has focused on the use of eugenic thought and theory amongst religious American Protestants, often associated with the rejection of Natural Selection and Evolution as the underlying scientific principles of eugenics. This project seeks to disrupt the historical association between eugenics and secularism, and extend understanding of what Asha Nadkarni calls “Eugenic Feminism.” The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the biggest women’s organization of the early 20th Century, simultaneously sought to expand the political and social power of women while maintaining Victorian constructions of gender inherent to the brand of Evangelical Christianity the organization espoused. Eugenics provided the women of the WCTU with an opportunity to attain a unique power as women and as mothers of the race in partnership with God.
The WCTU, thus, engaged in and relied upon eugenic ideology which necessitated the breeding of good, white, Christian babies as a means of asserting female authority within a patriarchal religious space. An archival exploration of WCTU publications and internal communications finds that despite common beliefs that religion and science were opposing concepts during the Progressive Era, the women of the WCTU sought not only to reconcile their pseudo-scientific beliefs in Eugenics with their theology as Evangelicals but found scriptural and theological justification for maternal eugenic authority as “God’s racial handmaiden”. Highlighting Evangelical women, and therefore filling a gap in the existing scholarship on Evangelical engagement with Eugenics, begins to expose the methods by which Evangelical women, past and present, form their approaches to issues of gender and sexuality.
Mentor
Dr. R. Marie Griffith
Additional Advisors
Dr. Cynthia Barounis, Dr. Rebecca A. Wanzo
Recommended Citation
Rosen, Sarah, "“Nature Herself Upholds the Law”: The WCTU’s Evangelical Eugenic Feminism, 1885-1925" (2024). Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Honors Papers. 1.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/wgss_honors/1