What might such burdens be? Stopes immediately makes an analogy between human and animal, and even plant, populations, based on the ‘fact’ that humans are in essence ‘biological units in their bodily sense’ (209). While, she says, there has been a tendency for a reduction in offspring among most species, too many are still born in each generation for all to be sustainable. Hence, the weak must die. This is an old canard, and is undisguisedly borrowed here from the theories of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) that ‘clearest-headed and blackest-hearted’ inheritor of the intellectual tradition of the French philosophes (and hence Freemasonry). On the following page Stopes provides an analogy for her theory: the cultivation of Shirley poppies. The basic idea is that when too many poppies occupy the same strip of soil they deteriorate in quality, and yet continue to reproduce themselves. Stopes imagines an experiment in which two identical plots are planted with the poppies; one with a dozen plants, the other with a hundred. In all likelihood, she says, the strip with a hundred plants will produce more stunted and unhealthy specimens than that with only a dozen. She emphasizes, however, that despite their inferior state, they would still succeed in reproducing themselves, That the analogy with deprived urban populations is entirely inapt need not be argued closely here; yet the implications are devastating for Stopes’s stated desire for planned human population growth. It is interesting that Stopes ends her little fable with the possibility that an entirely new species would come to eliminate the weaker population of poppies. In other words her analogy depends on nothing more than the most naked metaphors for social Darwinism.
The two causes that Stopes identifies for the ‘degeneracy’ of contemporary populations (or racial stocks as she would say) are: sexually transmitted diseases, and overcrowding. Stopes considered disease to be the most immediate cause of society’s weakness, but the more difficult and more fundamental problem is, she maintained, overpopulation. And this, because while a disease is an obvious ill, the desire to procreate is entirely natural, and normally perceived as a good. Stopes again reverts to a rather unusual analogy. She speaks of the ‘overcrowding’ of a mother’s womb: ‘Little is realized by the general public of the immensity of the effects of this crowding in the womb of the ignorant and helpless woman, of the torment she endures, of the weakening of the human stock which results.’ (213) Here is another intellectual deception. She again refers to the analogy of the strip of poppies, but of course the womb itself cannot be overcrowded except, and this is what Stopes apparently means, sequentially, with one pregnancy following another. Thus ‘the soil of the mother’s body’ is likened to the depleted fertility of an over-farmed field. The analogy is made boldly, but the case is not developed, let alone proven.
Stopes, in any case, returns to her imagined utopia, the ‘ideal’, now beginning to sound not dissimilar to Huxley’s Brave New World: ‘The race pictured in the Utopias – the human race as it may be – must have not only well-developed and sufficiently beautiful and adaptable bodies, it must have a mind increasingly attuned to the ideal.’ (215). What can she have in mind? It appears that Stopes feels that ‘overcrowding’ depletes the mental resources of the species too, and that similarly, a child born into ‘the poison of bitterness provoked by the anguish and horror of undersired maternity’ will likewise be touched by the mental imbalance and depression of the mother, and so will be marked for life. But there is more. Stopes perceives an innate revolt in womanhood. She (woman), thus marked by the successive generations of bitterness, is ready for ‘revolt’. ‘The revolt (ed. read ‘revolution’), the bitterness, which is now finding expression in violence and uprising in every part of the world, is the result not only of simple crowding, but is also the echo of the revolt and bitterness and horror of women who bore the burden of age-long tradition, no longer passively, but bearing it with the consciousness that it should not have been if they had been allowed full knowledge.’ (218-219, italics in original). A more clearly expressed statement of Freemasonic belief could scarcely be imagined within the context of this essay’s subject. As with all such poisons it is couched in the most warm and glowingly human terms. Stopes declares that this reign of bitterness and revolt would be over, and the new Utopia begin, if only every child were born of a woman that really wanted him, where he would be loved, cherished, and nurtured. Of course, we all desire that, but what is the means Stopes proposes to achieve this Utopia. Listen! ‘Translated into terms of everyday practice, I maintain that the only hope for the race is the conscious elimination of all diseased and overcrowded lives before their conception, by planning only to conceive those for whom adequate provision of material necessities and a loving welcome are reasonably to be anticipated.’ (221) Stopes of course, had none of the delicacy of contemporary liberals. She declares baldly, that ‘this Utopia could be achieved in my lifetime, had I the power to issue inviolable edicts. Alas! that the age of beneficent autocracy has never been and is not here today!’ (221)
And naturally Stopes was capable of rather more radical expression of these matters. In her 1920 work Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the Future, she advocates nothing less than the ‘sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood [to] be made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory.’[1] This claim is made in the context of a much wider argument about the demographics of large cities, where, as Stopes puts it, ‘society allows the diseased, the racially negligent, the thriftless, the careless, the feeble-minded, the very lowest and worst members of the community, to produce innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped, and inferior infants’. (211) This requires the state control of parenthood for the good of the wider community. ‘The power of parenthood ought no longer to be exercised by all, however inferior, as an "individual right." It is profoundly a duty and a privilege, and it is essentially the concern of the whole community.’ (211-212) One can imagine the dulcet tones of Hilary Clinton saying such a thing.
[1] This citation, common to a number of internet sources, is doubtful, as I have been unable to trace it in the original work: Marie C. Stopes, Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the Future (London: George Putnam’s Sons, 1920). Nevertheless the theme that this pseudo-quotation suggests is most certainly developed in the final chapter, XX ‘The Creation of a New and Irradiated Race’, pp. 208-228.
Thanks for this excellent piece. Are there any more instalments to come?
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