Conceiving the future : pronatalism, reproduction, and the family in the United States, 1890-1938 / Laura L. Lovett.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lovett, Laura L.

Series:

Gender & American culture.

Gender and American culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Families--United States--History--20th century.

Families.

Families size--United States--History--20th century.

Families size.

Families policy--United States--History--20th century.

Families policy.

Eugenics--United States--History--20th century.

Eugenics.

Nostalgia--United States--History--20th century.

Nostalgia.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (249 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 eug

Contents:

Nostalgia, modernism, and the family ideal

New occasions teach new duties : Mary Elizabeth Lease's maternalist agenda

Reclaiming the home : George H. Maxwell and the homecroft movement

The political economy of sex : Edward A. Ross and race suicide

Men as trees walking : Theodore Roosevelt and the conservation of the race

Fitter families for future firesides : Florence Sherbon and popular eugenics

American pronatalism.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [207]-228) and index.

ISBN:

979-88-908741-7-7

979-88-9313-133-8

1-4696-0472-8

0-8078-6810-8

OCLC:

793525333