Conceiving the Future - (Gender and American Culture) by Laura L Lovett (Paperback)

About the Book

Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938

Book Synopsis

Through nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, family, and the home, influential leaders in early twentieth-century America constructed and legitimated a range of reforms that promoted human reproduction. Their pronatalism emerged from a modernist conviction that reproduction and population could be regulated. European countries sought to regulate or encourage reproduction through legislation; America, by contrast, fostered ideological and cultural ideas of pronatalism through what Laura Lovett calls "nostalgic modernism," which romanticized agrarianism and promoted scientific racism and eugenics.

Lovett looks closely at the ideologies of five influential American figures: Mary Lease's maternalist agenda, Florence Sherbon's eugenic "fitter families" campaign, George Maxwell's "homecroft" movement of land reclamation and home building, Theodore Roosevelt's campaign for conservation and country life, and Edward Ross's sociological theory of race suicide and social control. Demonstrating the historical circumstances that linked agrarianism, racism, and pronatalism, Lovett shows how reproductive conformity was manufactured, how it was promoted, and why it was coercive. In addition to contributing to scholarship in American history, gender studies, rural studies, and environmental history, Lovett's study sheds light on the rhetoric of "family values" that has regained currency in recent years.

Review Quotes

"A richly detailed, well-organized, and thoroughly researched narrative analyzing how perceptions about rural America, gender, race, and the family shaped pronatalist public policy around the turn of the twentieth century." -- New England Quarterly

"A thoughtful and original approach to understanding the power of pronatalism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture." -- Journal of Social History

"A thoughtful and probing book that backdates the emergence of pronationalism in the United States to the late nineteenth century and exposes intersections of nostalgia, eugenics, motherhood, and the idealization of the white frontier family from the 1890s to the 1930s. . . . A nicely textured analysis." -- ISIS

"A useful complement to recent studies. . . . Contributes significantly to the further unraveling of . . . tenuous and slippery connections." -- The Journal of American History

"Lovett offers incisive intellectual portraits and a challenging analysis of how gender and race informed the dynamic of residual agrarianism and emergent scientific and governmental regulation in the Populist and Progressive eras." -- H-Net Reviews

"Lovett will surely help persuade social scientists of the joys and ironies of cultural history." -- PDR

"Readers of this imaginative book will see many issues in a fresh light. They may be inspired to think in new ways about the connections between Americans' environmentalism, their celebration of the family, and their anxieties about women's roles outside the home." -- Kansas History

"This eclectic mix of major and minor players and familiar and unfamiliar reform efforts demonstrates the ubiquity of pronatalist thought and its ideological flexibility." -- Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

"Touches on several different fields of American historical scholarship -- women's history, history of children and the family, rural history, environmental history, labor history, history of science, and history of the West. Its method, however, is solidly grounded in the history of ideas." -- Journal of Interdisciplinary History