Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain

Reproduction by DesignSex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain$
Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain
Angus McLaren
Print publication date: 2012

Print ISBN-13: 9780226560694

Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: March 2013

Introduction
Part One Speculative Literature and Mechanistic Progress
Chapter 1 “The standardized world we are facing and fearing”
Chapter 2 “What is better, a car or a wife?”
Chapter 3 “A race of human machines”
Part Two Beyond the Predictive Sex in Real Time
Chapter 4 “A sort of animal or mechanic immortality”
Chapter 5 “A spinster and a syringe”
Part Three Romantic Racialism
Chapter 6 “Breeding a race apart from nature”
Conclusion
END MATTER
SUBJECT(S) IN CHICAGO SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE
British and Irish Modern History
History
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“The standardized world we are facing and fearing”
Sex and Futurist Fictions

DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226560717.003.0002
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter illustrates how much of futurist literature focused on the topics of femininity, masculinity, birth control, and reproduction. Writing about the future was a classic means of legitimating an analysis of sex relations. Homosexuality was regarded as the logical manifestation of masculine decline. In the twentieth century, any discussion of sexuality had to take into account the availability of birth control. Futurists were divided on the potential effect of easy contraception. They found difficulty in avoiding the notion that the unproductive would eventually be eliminated. In general, Julian Huxley was important in simply being the best known of the many writers of his generation who, in writing about the future of reproduction, were torn between an admiration for planning and a distrust of the powers of science.

Keywords:   futurist literature, femininity, masculinity, birth control, reproduction, sex relations, homosexuality, sexuality, Julian Huxley

In the first pages of Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley's famous portrayal of a future dystopia, the author plunges us into a world where the state controls every aspect of human reproduction. In minute detail, he describes the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, with its Fertilizing Room, Bottling Room, Social Predestination Room, and Decanting Room. Most women in his envisaged society are induced to have their ovaries removed. Their eggs are harvested, inspected for abnormalities, and mixed with spermatozoa. Once conception occurs, the fertilized egg is incubated, fed, bathed in hormones, its sex determined, and the crucial decisions made—will it be twinned? Will it have its development arrested? And, if female, will it be made into a freemartin? Finally, instead of being born, babies are “decanted.” In this society, carrying a child to term is taboo, its citizens conditioned to be disgusted by the idea that reproduction was once “viviparous.” Now, Huxley has the director of the hatchery hailing ectogenesis—that is the conception and gestation of babies outside the womb—as “The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.”1

A prolific writer, Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was hailed as the voice of postwar upper-middle-class youth. A string of comic novels about cynical young men first established his reputation as an attacker of taboos. He was to move ultimately on (p.10) from dandyism to spiritualism, but it was Brave New World that was to win him lasting fame. As a member of an intellectual dynasty (his grandfather Thomas Huxley was Darwin's most famous defender), he was, unlike most mandarins, not hostile to science. Nevertheless his doubts about its ability to guarantee social progress led some like H. G. Wells to regard him as a pessimist.2

Innumerable studies have been made of Huxley's classic, with particular attention paid to his success in predicting future social and scientific developments.3 What has been slighted have been the ways in which he drew on contemporary concerns about reproduction. Brave New World was far from being original. It was only the most extreme and ultimately the best-known fictional manifestation of a cultural malaise, a British ambivalence about the ultimate benefits of the encroachment of science on human life. Even when sensationally raising the specter of Taylorism (or scientific management) applied to biology—suggesting the coming of a world in which natural childbirth would be regarded with horror and replaced by oophorectomies and ectogenesis—Huxley was drawing on concerns voiced by many others. To understand why they were broaching such issues, this chapter will sketch out the sexual challenges they believed that their modernizing society was producing—including restless women, incapacitated men, and declining fertility. The goal is to explain why so many believed that changes in reproduction and gender relationships posed serious dangers, and why the intervention of eugenics and medical science was regarded both as a cause and cure of such problems.

Between the 1870s and the 1940s Britain witnessed a surge in such futurist writing. A small army of writers tackled the question of what impact modernization might ultimately have on sex and the family. Those who addressed these issues ranged from highbrow novelists to middlebrow writers of science fiction. The late nineteenth-century speculative fictions generally reflected a belief in progress and technology.4 In the twentieth century, a shift occurred, with a decline in the utopian interest in social or political planning, and a growing fixation on the possibility of the biological penetration and transformation of minds and bodies. What if the ambition was not just to produce planned communities but to plan and control nature itself? Building motorcars on assembly lines or scientifically organizing the planting of trees was all well and good. It was the question of whether births should be planned and controlled that sparked the fiercest responses. Debates about the merits of subjecting humans to scientific surveillance and intervention necessarily and inevitably focused on reproduction.5

Those offering predictions about how sex and reproduction might change offered a variety of scenarios. Early futurist literature optimistically tended to assume (p.11) that in an egalitarian future world women's reproductive decisions would not be constrained by social concerns. In the American Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), a cooperative society of the year 2000 continues gender norms, but women have no “unnatural rivalry” with men. If they are “allowed” by men to work—since it keeps them healthy—sexual differences are still respected. Employment does not deter women from marriage—indeed one has to be a wife and mother to obtain the highest status.6 Bellamy argued that if sexual selection were to operate freely, it was necessary that women not marry for money. Nevertheless he credited his economically independent women with continuing to be charmingly feminine. He asserts that coquetry is ended, yet girls continue to blush. If women are purportedly “free,” before marrying they still seek their fathers' consent.

The English socialist William Morris responded to Bellamy with News from Nowhere (1890). His too is a utopia where domestic tyranny, sexual ignorance, and “commercial marriages” are unknown. Women are happy to be wives and mothers. The idea of the “superior” women to emancipate their sex from the bearing of children is now recognized as folly. As maternity in a cooperative community poses no hardships, the free woman “has far more instinct for maternity than the poor drudge and mother of drudges of past days.”7

In A Modern Utopia (1905), H. G. Wells likewise imagined sexual desires being harnessed for the benefit of the community. At the moment, love was made “too elaborately,” too much erotic brooding occurred. Overindulgence was followed by demoralization and excesses; promiscuity led to social instability. Such dangers were skirted in utopia. “And, in the matter of love, a straight and clean desire for a clean and straight fellow-creature was our Founders' ideal. They enjoined marriage between equals as the samurai's duty to the race, and they framed directions of the precisest sort to prevent that uxorious inseparableness, that connubiality which will reduce a couple of people to something jointly less than either.”8 The novelist and historian H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was commonly regarded as the father of British science fiction. He was the best-known writer of the generation who prior to World War One brought to a close a form of reassuring futurist writing that looked forward to an idealized state. His fame as a prophetic thinker peaked about 1910, but he continued to churn out didactic accounts of the social and political functioning of future societies that demonstrated his optimistic faith in science.9

Responding to the rise of organized labor and the creation of socialist parties, twentieth-century writers made more pessimistic predictions. Drawing on reports of advances in the biological sciences, the New Zealander Godfrey Sweven (p.12) (John Macmillan Brown) in Limanora: The Island of Progress (1903) describes a society where reproduction is supervised by the state. Only the best are allowed to propagate while the diseased are sterilized. Childbearing is carried out to fill vacancies. The character of the embryos are known and their development guided before their birth.10 In attacking the idea of such a future socialist dystopia, the anonymously penned Backwards and Forwards (1905) portrays a totalitarian state with its state schools and post offices, its legislation on haircuts and facial expressions. It even has written rules of courtship.11 Women, the author asserts, become slovenly drabs since their love of approbation has vanished. They had once been the more vain sex, but since marriages are now arranged they no longer compete for attention. Indeed the state sorts out couples to provide biological uniformity, gives them numbers instead of names, and has them live in barracks.12

One key question haunted such speculative writing—would women change? In the earlier utopian or futurist accounts, women are presented as essentially passive. Countering such hopeful depictions of a future in which sexual harmony would reign was a long line of works inspired by the male fear of women ultimately rebelling and seizing power, a prospect inspired by the current suffragist campaign. Walter Besant's Revolt of Man (1882) begins with women in control, but men rise up against the female dictatorship and even women recognize their mistake of seeking equality.13 Billing itself as “Appointed for use in the National Schools of Japan, Tokio, 2005,” Elliot Evans Mills's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1905) attributed the domination of the country by the town as responsible for Britain's twenty-first-century enfeebled health, undisciplined hooligans, excessive taxes, and emancipated women.14 Similar antifeminist accounts include Allan Reeth, Legions of the Dawn (1908); Jesse Wilson, When the Women Reign: 1930 (1909); A. C. Fox-Davies, The Sex Triumphant (1909); and Anon., When Woman Rules! A Tale of the First Women's Government (1923).15 Comic versions of the threat to gender norms also appeared. In John of Jingalo: The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties (1912), Laurence Housman, presented a king supporting women's suffrage after falling on his head.16 The Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock envisaged a world in which men read the fashion columns and took hours to dress for dinner while women threw on their clothes and demanded to be paid for their domestic services.17 Arguments made in favor of the clear distinction of the sexes were pushed to ludicrous lengths. In the dreary An Unknown Land (1942), H. L. Samuel imagined a search for Bacon's New Atlantis resulting in the discovery of Bensalem, a cooperative society in which suturization is employed to increase the brain size of newborns.18 Those who oppose such operations on (p.13) moral grounds form an inferior and separate caste. It goes without saying that men's skulls are always larger than women's.

Other writers produced far more radical accounts of possible shifts in gender relations.19 One popular genre was the positive depiction of women finally coming to political office.20 Sexual issues were usually skirted in such novels, but in Lady Florence Dixie's Gloriana; or, The Revolution of 1900 (1890), a cross-dressing young woman becomes prime minister with the result that women's emancipation is achieved, the population problem is solved, and the blight of abortions ended.21 A 1930S version of such a tale was Elise Kay Gresswell's When Yvonne Was Dictator (1935). It told of a young woman whose charisma wins her the love of the people who make her prime minister and finally dictator. The economic situation is initially so dire that the unemployed engage in mass suicide. Yvonne finds the answer in Malthusian economics. In her maiden speech at the age of eighteen, she says she would make it a crime for a man to father more children than he can provide for. She insists relief be given in kind. Work, not the dole, is the answer. Once dictator, her platform consists of the revision of marriage contracts, a women's charter, extension of divorce, establishment of labor colonies for the unemployed, compulsory retirement, the disestablishment of the church, national health insurance, and equal pay and working conditions. Thanks to a motherhood strike, a fall in births occurs, heralding a revival of the economy.22

Much was written openly about the prospect of women entering politics. More care was taken by writers in broaching the issue of releasing female desire, but futurist fears of sexually liberated women had a long history. In Edward George Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), an adventurer who discovers an underground society is most disturbed by the power women enjoy there. Because they are socially superior, their faces are “devoid of the softness and timidity of expression which give charm to the face of woman as seen on earth above.”23 The narrator is stirred by one girl's visage “because it looked less bold—less conscious of female rights.”24 In this world, women wear red if they prefer to be single, and gray when in pursuit of men. While males play the coquette, females are sexually aggressive and make “immodest” overtures. The erotic interest taken in the narrator by Zee—“my host's highly informed and powerfully proportioned daughter”—is dangerous as she could easily reduce him to a cinder.25 Women have full equality here, even the power to destroy their spouse; fortunately, the one time a woman destroyed her spouse, women were so horrified that they swore to never do it again. Similarly divorce and polygamy, though allowed, are not used.

As one approached the twentieth century, the looser female morals that writers had attributed to other times and places were discovered closer to home.

(p.14) H. G. Wells in his scientific horror story The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) reported that when half-human beasts reverted to their animal state, the females were the first to abandon monogamy and return to promiscuity. His narrator escapes the island, yet once back in civilization feels people are much like animals. Prowling women “mew” after him, and the blank-faced commuters seem hardly human.26 For Wells, the civilized woman was a “sexual specialist,” more sexualized than her primitive sisters. “Arrayed in what she calls distinctly ‘dress,’ scented, adorned, displayed, she achieves by artifice a sexual differentiation profounder than that of any other vertebrated animal.”27 Too often, he declared, she was an “unwholesome stimulant” on man.28

A common trope in futurist writing was to imagine female sexual mores being undermined as a result of a disastrous war. In reporting on the surges of blights such as venereal disease and divorce following the Great War, the newspaper press popularized such notions. Edward Shanks's The People of the Ruins (1920) portrayed the London of 2074, a tragic wreck of a society that had suffered decades of warfare.29 The narrator has a romantic tie with a young woman, but Shanks does not provide a full account of sex or gender changes as did Cicely Hamilton in Lest Ye Die (1922). Though starting with a similar scenario of a war-ravaged world reverting back to savagery, she differed in highlighting the emergence of sexually aggressive women. One flings herself at the hero—Theodore Savage—who has just enlisted. He's embarrassed; she's excited by the conflict. With the collapse of society, some women prostitute themselves. Savage picks up a girl and they enter into the “married state,” though the author notes the absence of legal sanction. On her death he takes another wife.30 Such themes were echoed by the Scottish Marxist Lewis Grassic Gibbon in Gay Hunter (1934), which provided an account of England after a devastating atomic war. There is again a reversion back to a hunter-gatherer world where the naked narrator flees vicious fascists and shamelessly mates with a female friend.31

Surprisingly enough, Huxley, who questioned so many pieties, presented gender relations in his dystopia as unchanging. He was clearly not especially sympathetic to women.32 All the scientists in his Brave New World are male; the chief female character is the stereotypical dumb blonde.33 Lenina, described as “wonderfully pneumatic,” first appears pulling down the zippers on her jacket, trousers, and panties. Zippers, in the 1930s considered modern and masculine, make the sexually aggressive woman's body immediately accessible. If such a portrayal was morally subversive, it remains the case that in Huxley's account all that women gain from centuries of scientific progress is that men unapologeti-cally viewed them as meat.34

(p.15) There were feminist futurists who boldly tackled the sex question. Responding to misogynists, Dora Russell (wife of the philosopher Bertrand Russell) presented in Hypatia (1925) a spirited defense of the sexually liberated women. Women of the 1920s were, she asserted, healthier and freer than ever before. The war led to their sexual emancipation, and they now were willing to admit their enjoyment. Russell went furthest in arguing that sex provided the woman with a real understanding of others and did not need to be justified by marriage or children.35 She even argued in favor of polyandry.36 Discussing the future of morals, the philosopher C. E. M. Joad agreed that economic change was affecting marriage. Women no longer had to sell themselves, and the line between married and unmarried was increasingly blurred. Birth control was spreading, and along with it came an end to the sexual double standard. If women were revealed to be no more monogamous than men, that did not mean that orgies ensued. Opposition to such changes, Joad argued, were based on fear of pleasure, not any actual evidence of danger to the race. He held up the example of the Soviet Union where, as a result of morals being more relaxed, sex was not as overvalued as it was in the West.37

Where did men figure in such speculations about the future? In Brave New World, elite men are preoccupied by sex and leisure time activities while the working masses prefer to consume drugs rather than fight to win their “manhood.”38 The state enjoins men to be like machines: “There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men, stable in contentment.”39 The fear that the progress of civilization might empower women but weaken men was a common trope in futurist literature. H. G. Wells typically worried about gender boundaries being blurred. In The Time Machine (1895), the narrator's first concern on entering a future society is, “What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?”40 In fact, he meets frail creatures, the Eloi—hairless, girlish vegetarians. They are so small and beautiful he finds it difficult to tell the sexes apart. Wells, himself a puny little man, represents the evil Morlocks as no more manly. His narrator is revolted by these “human rats”: “soft creatures” with lank fingers, clammy little hands, and whispering voices. Gender ambiguity was similarly a focus of Edwin Lester Arnold's Lieut. Gulliver Jones: His Vacation (1905). His narrator discovers Mars to be inhabited by a caste of genderless toilers. In this world, they draw lots to select their marriage partners. In propagating, they simply do their duty and have no concept of father or mother. He asks the pretty boys their sex; they want to know why it's so important to be one or the other. Fortunately the Martian to whom he is most attracted turns out to be female.41

(p.16) A number of writers took homosexuality as the logical manifestation of masculine decline. Max Nordau's prognosis was that in the twentieth century degeneration and hysteria would spread. Sexual psychopathy is soon so advanced that men wear clothes that in color and cut resemble feminine attire, while women in turn sport masculine dress. Modesty and restraint vanish. The complete perversion of social norms is finally obtained: “The demand of persons with the ‘contrary’ sexual sentiment that persons of the same sex can conclude a legal marriage has obtained satisfaction, seeing they have been numerous enough to elect a majority of deputies having the same tendency.”42 H. G. Wells, in The Shape of Things to Come (1933), has a future historian disdainfully comment on how chaotic twentieth-century society was as compared to that of the constrained Victorians. “As the gravity of economic and political problems increased and the structural unsoundness of the world became more manifest, sexual preoccupations seem to have afforded a sort of refuge from the mental strain demanded by the struggle. People distracted themselves from the immense demands of the situation by making a great noise about the intensifications and aberrations of the personal life. There was a real propaganda of drugs and homosexuality among the clever young.”43 In Man's World (1926), Charlotte Haldane (wife of the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane) describes a character who “tended to be intermediate sexually.” His “submasculinity”—blamed on his mother not doing the right antenatal exercises—results in his mystical impulses and sterility. For Haldane, it is essential that men and women be normal if they are to create “a self-conscious race.”44 In fact, interwar science fiction infrequently portrayed homosexuality, and Olaf Stapledon's Odd John (1935) was especially unusual in nonjudgmentally having its chief character pass through a homosexual phase.45

Futurist literature repeatedly harped on the question as to what purpose sex would serve. Strikingly enough, when Brave New World appeared, the American magazine Amazing Stories panned the book for saying too much about sex and being too negative about science. “From the point of view of the science-fiction fan, this book is a decided flop. Its contents, which at times almost become obscene, but are at all times supercharged with sex, will undoubtedly bar it from circulation in Boston, but the book may serve to call the attention of a great many readers to the fact that there is a class of fiction in existence which deals with scientific subjects.”46 One can see why the book was regarded by some as indecent. Huxley presents a society where monogamy and romance are condemned, while sex education and erotic play are obligatory. Young women are embarrassed to admit that they are not promiscuous. Men chew sex-hormone gum and swap partners. Drug-fueled orgies (“orgy-porgy”) replace religion. But did Huxley favor (p.17) such behavior? The biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham pointed out that in the novel sex was used by the state as a diversion and a means of control. Social stability was achieved by conditioning and “by allowing ‘unlimited copulation’ (sterile, of course) and unlimited sexual gratification of every kind.”47 The philosopher Bertrand Russell preceded Huxley in foreseeing such a scientific world in which ardent affections among the elite would be suspect whereas the lower orders would be provided with frivolous entertainments. “Lovemaking among the sterilized will be subjected to no restrictions either of law or of public opinion, but it will be casual and temporary, involving none of the deeper feelings and no serious affection.”48

H. G. Wells was perhaps the most vocal in predicting that in the future Victorian sexual restraints would ease. In Anticipations (1902), he claimed, “So few people seem to be leading happy and healthy sexual lives that to mention the very word ‘sexual’ is to set them stirring, to brighten the eye, lower the voice, and blanch or flush the cheek with a flavour of guilt. We are all, as it were, keeping our secrets and hiding our shames.” The state, he insisted, only had a right to interest itself in procreation; recreational sex should be free. The sexual question he compared to one's liking for golf. “In each case it would be for the medical man and the psychologist to decide how far the thing was wholesome and permissible, and how far it was an aggressive bad habit and an absorbing waste of time and energy. An able-bodied man continually addicted to love-making that had no result in offspring would be just as silly and morally objectionable as an able-bodied man who devoted his chief energies to hitting little balls over golf-links.”49

So too in Godfrey Sweven's Limanora: The Island of Progress (1903) sex ceases to have its allure. “The lustful had been exiled and it was easy to eradicate from the natures of those that remained all trace of sexual passion, and with it all pruriency. The chief purpose of sex in nature, that of propagation of the family, became its sole purpose.”50 Since sex feelings are gone, so too is prudery; citizens dress in diaphanous gowns that conceal nothing. Their scientists conclude that sex was an accident, which not all species needed. It had once played its role in evolution, but now it has to be controlled if the race is to progress. John Gloag in To-Morrow's Yesterday (1932) went so far as to imagine the emergence after millions of years of catlike beings who, unlike lascivious humans, are not distracted by sex except during set seasons. “As our kind developed their brains they conquered fear and lust, for the first scientists soon learned to mechanize the reproductive process, so that in half a million years sex was altogether silenced, leaving us a freedom men had never known.”51

James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933), the best seller responsible for introducing (p.18) the term “Shangri-La” to the English vocabulary, was yet another example of the British fascination with a faraway society protected, not only from the contamination of “dance-bands, cinemas, sky-signs,” but also from the “hard, mocking, sex-thirsty voices of women” of the outside world.52 The inhabitants of this Himalayan retreat, seeking tranquility through yoga, purportedly recognize no sex or race distinctions, though its founder and lama is a French priest and his successor is to be an Englishman. In Shangri-La, where the monks conveniently speak English, Father Perrault states that the Chinese and Tibetans are rather insensitive so do not live beyond one hundred. “Our best subjects, undoubtedly, are the Nordic and Latin races of Europe; perhaps the Americans would be equally adaptable.”53 The narrator finds the female lama has virtues lacking in the Western woman and loves his little Manchu. Unlike the “passion-driven races” she knows how to “calm the throb of desire” and pursue serenity.54

In the twentieth century, any discussion of sexuality had to take into account the availability of birth control. In 1918, Marie Stopes published Wise Parenthood, which directly broached the issue of birth control by providing diagrams of the reproductive organs and descriptions of a variety of contraceptives. To make such devices accessible to the working class, in March 1921 Stopes opened her Mother's Clinic in Holloway Road, London. The chief aim of Stopes's Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, also established in 1921, was to pressure government officials into taking over the responsibility for such work.55

Society had once relied on women's fear of pregnancy as a natural method of policing sexual behavior. Futurists were divided on the possible impact of easy contraception. Optimists predicted the coming of healthier and happier families. Pessimists viewed the spread of birth control information as potentially as threatening to morality as the ravages of war. The debate over the pros and cons of fertility control had, of course, predated modern contraception. H. G. Wells's The Time Machine includes a clear enunciation of the Malthusian population theory: “Where population is balanced and abundant, much child-bearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and offspring are secure, there is less necessity—indeed there is no necessity—for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children's needs disappears.”56 The problem, as presented by Wells, was that with too much civilization the weak survive. “Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.”57 Spared threats and hardships a slothful society emerges that is, “against connubial jealousy, against fierce maternity, against passions of all sorts.” The Elois now do nothing save entertain themselves and make love “in a half-playful fashion.”58 In short, the population is checked too (p.19) well. Wells returned to the subject of population control in The Dream (1924). From two thousand years in the future, beings look back to the 1900s and marvel at the society's gloomy religion, poor education, and swarms of “unpremeditated children.” “Love was a disgrace, a leering fraud, a smutty joke.”59 Divorces, abortions, and deaths in childbearing are all attributed by Wells to attempting to adhere to an impossible moral code.

In Wells's Men Like Gods (1923), birth control works because it is employed eugenically. Mr. Barnstaple drives his little yellow car into the future. He finds a peaceful society where people are no longer forced by the laws or economic necessity into monogamous marriages. Women are free; the family is not so much abolished as “enlarged.” Citizens unashamedly go about nude, and the population is regulated.

“And you dare to regulate increase! You control it! Your women consent to bear children as they are needed—or refrain!”

“Of course,” said Urthred, “Why not?”

“I feared as much,” said Father Amerton, and leaning forward he covered his face with his hands, murmuring, “I felt this in the atmosphere! The human stud farm! Refusing to create souls! The wickedness of it! Oh, my God!”60

His host rationally explains to his twentieth-century visitor that overpopulation led to the wars, crop disasters, and economic depressions that overthrew the old society. Now eugenics hold sway. “The indolent and inferior do not procreate here.”61

According to C. P. Blacker, president of he Eugenics Society, if birth control were not made available to the masses, Britain would be overrun by the “drunken unemployable” and the “useless parasite.” Due to medical advances, many defectives were “now artificially kept alive to perpetuate their kind.” Feebleminded women were constantly pregnant. Enlightened workers needed help if they were to ape the middle class's restriction of fertility. Blacker cited a survey that revealed that over half of Saturday night conceptions were undesired.62 Restriction of fertility, agreed Bertrand Russell, was needed for balanced growth.63 Blind nature would eventually be replaced by conscious planning. As a result, both the individual and the race would benefit.

Huxley was supposedly inspired by the idea of satirizing Wells's Men Like Gods to write Brave New World. Huxley had joked, “Mr. H. G. Wells portrays in Men Like Gods a race of athletic chemists and mathematical physicists who go about naked (p.20) and, unlike Mr. Shaw's austerer Ancients, make free love in a rational manner between the experiments.”64 In Brave New World, Huxley provides a bleaker view of Malthusianism. Women are either subjected to oophorectomies or, if fertile, use a Malthusian belt with a regulation supply of contraceptives and, if all else fails, turn to abortion centers. Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, girls are subjected to Malthusian drills.65 “He knows their pleasures,” Charlotte Haldane wrote of Huxley's characters “of which the foremost is promiscuous intercourse without fertilization. Here he makes a slight mistake, for no young lady six hundred years hence would wear so primitive a garment as a Malthusian belt stuffed with contraceptives when a periodic injection of suitable hormones would afford her ample protection.”66

Would, many futurist wondered, women continue to embrace motherhood as their highest calling? As its title suggested, Charlotte Haldane's Motherhood and Its Enemies (1927) argued that childbearing was the basis of family life. In the past, the large family and religion were the bulwark of the home. “Modern love,” she fretted, was more conditional and therefore more precarious. Birth control allowed women to experiment sexually, and “amateurs” were now elbowing aside paid prostitutes. Such women could not be good wives or mothers since they were likely already infected with cravings for excitement, hatred of the home, and a dislike of children. Indeed, she asserted, such “abnormal women”—thanks to contraceptive protection—were seeking to gratify what were in effect masculine desires.67 Huxley took repeated potshots at birth control as a fad embraced by unthinking young women trying to appear modern.68 In a short story, he has an older writer say of a young fan, “You should hear her prattling away about inverts and perverts and birth control—but prattling from unplumbed depths of innocence and practical ignorance. Very queer. And touching too. Much more touching than the old-fashioned innocences of the young creatures who thought babies were brought by storks. Knowing all about love and lust, but in the same way one knows all about quadratic equations.”69

In Brave New World, the goal is a stable population, enforced by the state. This oppressive interpretation of birth control, which presented it as symptomatic of a materialistic age in which the most intimate matters were subjected to planning, was taken up by a number of writers. In Birth Control and the State: A Plea and a Forecast (1926), his contribution to the To-Day and To-Morrow series, C. P. Blacker noted that one of the common arguments against birth control was the fear of the bureaucratic surveillance of one's private life.70 The crassness of planning births was noted even by some of the campaign's supporters. In H. G. Wells's The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914), one proponent of the collectivized (p.21) family form says of the middle class, “But it's not a fine life, it's not a full life, that life in a Neo-Malthusian suburban hutch.”71 Charlotte Haldane agreed that birth control empowered women. Would it be used for good purposes? She worried that being driven by economic necessity to restrict their fertility women were curtailing their own psychological and physiological development. The state could provide mothers with financial support, yet Haldane admitted that there was scant evidence such help increased births.72 The threat of depopulation was raised by the statistician Enid Charles. She argued that if each woman did not bear at least three children, Britain's population would decline.73 In an acquisitive society, children were increasingly regarded as luxuries. She suggested that the Soviet Union could be taken as a model of a state providing the sort of social supports that encouraged maternity.

Some offered alternative views of Britain's demographic future. Echoing William Morris, John Gloag imagined an English population happily reduced to the three million citizens who preferred the fresh air of a garden to the stench of in-dustrialism.74 In Sydney Fowler Wright's Deluge (1927), a flood offers the chance of remaking civilization.75 But most writers of science fiction assumed that the direction in which society was moving could not be altered. Fowler Wright presented birth control and the motorcar as the two key manifestations of modern society's opposition to nature. In his bleak short story “Justice” (1930), he envisaged the restriction of fertility eventually resulting in such a demographic imbalance that by the 1960s the law ceases to penalize the killing of those over the age of sixty-five by motorcar.76 In her 1926 novel, Muriel Jaeger imagined a man sent into a future of flying machines, euthanasia halls, and economic cooperation. Marriages are more honest, and casual unions are tolerated. Crucially, prosperity is due to the limiting of population.77 Michael Arlen's Man's Mortality (1933), an account of the air battles of the late twentieth century, includes a report of Italy forcing birth control on its Hindu reservation in Africa.78 And finally some imagined the airplane itself ultimately serving to regulate population. A bizarre account of newborns being thrown out of planes as a form of fertility control was provided by Olaf Stapledon in his futurist fantasy Last and First Men (1930). He tells us that far into the future sterilization and contraception are displaced by the ritual of airplane suspension.

In the life of every individual, flying played a great part. Immediately after birth he was taken up by a priestess of flight and dropped, clinging to a parachute, to be deftly caught upon the wings of his father's plane. This ritual served as a substitute for contraception (forbidden as an interference (p.22) with the divine energy); for since in many infants the old simian grasping-instinct was atrophied, a large proportion of the new-born let go and were smashed upon the paternal wings.79

Unfortunately for the race, the trial proves to favor the stronger rather than the most intelligent.

What impact would contraception have on the family of the future? The issues of changing gender relationships and access to birth control were necessarily broached by every writer who sought to predict what sorts of new family forms would emerge.80 Wells, posing as an advocate of free love, in Anticipations (1901) imagined that in years to come monogamy would probably still be embraced by the majority, but a certain amount of “regrouping” would also take place as it was illogical to yoke together the unhappy. Nevertheless Wells gallantly granted that it was unfair to cast off a woman whose period of “maximum attractiveness” was short lived.81 In Mankind in the Making (1903), Wells foresaw the old manacles of morality being shed yet sex still being confined by less obvious restraints. For him, the goal of the new freedoms had to be the production of healthy children.82 In Days of the Comet (1906), Wells furthered his attack on the traditional family. Lovemaking in the old society Wells described as crude and unenlightened. Youth were given no sex education. “We were like misguided travelers who had camped in the dry bed of a tropical river. Presently we were knee deep and neck deep in the flood.”83 Struggles for sexual dominance are destructive and humiliating until a mysterious comet's green gas descends on earth and ends paltry passions. The world awakens to the evils of war, materialism, and politics. Sexual jealousy disappears. Youths traditionally brought up to believe that some day they will meet the single person meant for them now know it is not necessarily true. Asking if marriage is not really a form of “extravagant mutual proprietorship,” Wells ends the novel with four friends in a sort of group marriage.84 Such sexual musings were considered shocking when they first appeared. By the 1920s, the younger generation of readers considered Wells's posing as a sex radical inherently fraudulent, given the fact that he always took the male point of view and indeed seemed intent on producing transparent rationalizations of his own erratic sexual behavior.

The most radical of the feminist visions of future family life was Vera Brit-tam's Halcyon; or, The Future of Monogamy (1929).85 Blurring the line between speculative fiction and predictive social science, Brittain presents a woman professor of moral philosophy at Oxford in the twenty-first century dreaming about the past history of moral progress. In the bad old days of the 1920s, ignorance (p.23) reigned. “War babies” had been welcomed, but peace babies shunned. Hypocrites defended monogamy while divorce rates climbed; depopulation was lamented by the very people most zealously employing contraceptives. Fortunately the period 1930–75 was an era of sexual reform that resulted in a liberalization of divorce and laws allowing “semi-detached” or intermittent marriages. Genuine monogamy was achieved with the assuring of women's economic independence, the state becoming guardian of all children, the Sexual Instruction Act of 1948 (with mandatory classes), the Trial Marriages Act of 1969, and the Second Contracts Act of 1973 allowing remarriage without divorce during the prolonged absence of a spouse. As a result, the husband no longer felt trapped by the “jealous possessiveness” of a wife confined to the home and hence unable to tolerate his affairs. “Man's need for diversion was indeed comprehensible when his wife resembled at best a well-groomed cow devoid of mental qualities.” Wives had once been no more than “carefully-reared animals with whom sex-intercourse was an humiliating concession grudgingly bestowed in return for an economic quid pro quo.” Now they were fully rounded individuals who could offer “that variety of experience which married men had once desperately sought from the physical novelties of the mistress or prostitute.” Hormonal treatments allowed couples to age symmetrically. Some ectogenesis took place, but just as importantly childbirth was made pleasurable. Moreover “the general standard of intelligence rose rapidly after the sterilization of the unfit became law in 1981,” while those who devoted excessive energy to “sex-experiences” lost out to the better disciplined. Even trial marriages declined; most would wait until they were “reasonably sure” before having sex. Promiscuity disappeared, partly due to “minute glandular operations which modify the character of desire.” Though occasional open lapses in marital fidelity were allowed, it was understood that they “should be indulged in only as the outcome of mutual agreement between husband and wife.” The result was that marriage emerged reformed and refreshed, the supreme expression of love.86 While others worried about the impact of the machine on morals, Brittain optimistically hailed the “elasticity of domestic life” offered by technological advances. Between 1850 and 1950 many marriages broke down because of the husband having to be away from home for long periods of time. Such long separations due to primitive transport, “so perilous to conjugal fidelity,” were no longer necessary in the era of the telephone and air travel. Thanks to the entertainments offered by loudspeakers and “televisors,” the home itself became a more welcoming and interesting retreat.87

Other optimists chimed in.88 The socialist physician Eden Paul in Chronos; or, The Future of the Family (1930) noted unmarried women now were sexually emancipated (p.24) cipated because of their access to birth control. Families would become smaller, but the community would serve a role as “over-parent.”89 In his study of the home of the future, Harry Joseph Birnstingl predicted the “uncontrolled breeding among civilized mankind will soon cease altogether,” so smaller homes and flats would be needed.90 The sexologist Norman Haire dared to suggest that in the future, as women grew more prosperous, there would be a probable growth of male prostitution.91 Bertrand Russell, like most progressives, hailed the coming of smaller families, sex education, and divorce reform. In his eyes, the family at the very least served a function in maintaining the habit of having children. Russell did raise the specter of the father's position diminishing, as the state (as was the case in the Soviet Union) played a greater and greater role in child care. The American behavioral psychologist John B. Watson looked forward to all children being housed in well-run nurseries—not orphanages but wonderful institutions in the countryside where physicians' and nurses' “conditioning hands will not be obtrusive.” Watson believed the traditional home would not be missed by the inhabitants of such superior institutions.92 In contrast, Russell worried about the enormous new powers the state would enjoy once it had the ability to reach children of every class.93

Huxley's account of the destruction of the family follows Bertrand Russell's lead. In Brave New World, the old family—regarded as obscenely suffocating, inherently pressure packed, and unstable—has been dispensed with. Babies are born in bottles, not to mothers; parenting is replaced by state crèches, and infants are exposed to psychological conditioning. The elite still live in houses, but the masses are confined to barracks. Despite painting such a bleak portrayal of a possible future, Huxley and Russell were attacked by G. E. Newsom, chaplain of King's College, London, as the leaders in the campaign to destroy the existing family. Their “new morality” would result, he predicted, in the state encroaching on the family, in birth control threatening the extinction of the civilized race, in sex and reproduction being split, in fatherhood being made harder to prove, in children being raised in nurseries thereby threatening even motherhood, and in eugenics encouraging only quality breeders.94 This was a case of Newsom so disliking the message that he shot the messenger.

From the turn of the century onward a number of writers had warned that if socialism ever prevailed, the traditional family structure would be its first casualty. Brave New World echoes such works as Horace Wykeham Can Newte's The Master Beast: Being a True Account of the Ruthless Tyranny Inflicted on the British People by Socialism, A.D. 1888–2020 (1907). As the title suggests, Newte tells of a future socialist society where a ruling class enforces conformity in dress, work, (p.25) and housing on soulless slaves. Permanent marriage is ended, easy divorce is available, children are raised in state nurseries. Sexual self-denial no longer operates. “Socialism has unhappily removed women's safeguards and inducements to morality, with the result that as a whole (of course, there are exceptions) the sex runs morally amok.” Now women, “naked and unashamed,” participate in saturnalias. Since they are free of child care and fertility has declined, “caused by the prevailing immorality,” it is no surprise that the soulless should prostitute themselves. With no competition the race declines, as made evident by the increased amount of Cockney twang. So weakened by socialism, Britain is finally overrun by “the scourings of Asia and Africa.”95 A similar socialist dystopia was sketched out by F. Britten Austin in The Red Flag (1932). After a revolution in the year 1977, numbers replace names and subjects are taught that love is a psychological delusion. Now there is an “entirely free association of the sexes,” with no sense of one having a spouse and children.96 The society's citizens do still pair off; they “register” for a year, and can renew. They give up their babies to the state.97

Eugenic concerns implicitly or explicitly framed almost every account of the future of sex, gender, and reproduction. Some writers viewed such a prospect with hope, others with horror. As a large literature has been devoted to the history of eugenics, it is not necessary here to give a detailed account of the movement. What is important to note, however, is that writers from across the political spectrum believed a future society would take measures to assure the reproduction of the healthy and repress the reproduction of the degenerate.98

The fact that science-fiction writers exploited eugenic themes is well known; less noted is the fact that many eugenic writings of serious social scientists were patent fantasies. Francis Galton, the creator of eugenics, produced about 1910 a sketch of his utopia, “Kantsaywhere.” After his death, the story was apparently censored, and only a few portions appeared in Karl Pearson's biography of Galton. In Galton's tale, the money left by a benefactor is distributed by a college, not to the feeble but to “to help those who were strong by nature to multiply and to be well-nourished.” In this community, it is necessary to pass an exam to establish one's fitness to reproduce. Even pronunciation counts. “The 'arry and 'arriet class is wholly unknown in Kantsaywhere.”99 Those who fail are not allowed to breed. If they do not willingly remain celibate, they are forcibly segregated in labor colonies. Patriarchal power is assured, women marrying at about twenty-two, men when established at about thirty. The women are buxom and “seem promising mothers of a noble race.” The men are well built and resolute. The elderly Galton obviously savored such a vision. “Both sexes are true to themselves, the women being thoroughly feminine, and I may add, mammalian, and the men being as (p.26) thoroughly virile.”100 As we have already noted, such scenarios of future worlds or distant utopias where fitness was rewarded and degeneracy repressed predated the science of eugenics. There was a long tradition in the West of passions being regarded as “a threat to regulated social harmony.”101 Ideas about the community's duty to supervise breeding go back as far as Plato's Republic.102 Real possibilities of control only existed from the 1800s onward.103

Eugenic views studded the late nineteenth-century utopian writings.104 In Edward Bellamy's utopia, love matches serve eugenics: “It means that for the first time in human history the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation.” Women no longer marry for money. “Every generation is sifted through a little finer mesh than the last. The attributes that human nature admire are preserved, those that repel it are left behind.” The result is “race purification.”105 Citizens feel a responsibility to the community to have the best possible marriage. The men not chosen by women are laggards, failures in life. This notion that some control over reproduction would serve to weed out the unfit was almost always assumed in such utopian literature.106

In A Modern Utopia (1905), Wells portrays a utopian earth controlled by a single world government. Population is its key preoccupation. Misfits—including idiots, invalids, and criminals—are sent, not to lethal chambers, but to prison islands where the sexes are separated to prevent them from breeding, while the better sort are allowed to reproduce. All are cared for by the state, but in return parentage is only allowed the independent. The worst misfits are subjected to “social surgery.”107 In a chapter devoted to “Women in modern utopia,” Wells reiterates his argument that motherhood is a racial duty the woman owes the state. She must not be allowed to shirk it. “Our system of morals, therefore, has to make it worth while and honourable to be a mother; it is particularly undesirable that it should be held to be right for a woman of exceptional charm or exceptional cleverness to evade motherhood, unless, perhaps, to become a teacher.”108 As a child-bearer, she in return is entitled to the wages and respect of any other civil servant. Choosing the “profession” of motherhood secures the woman's economic independence. And since the state's only concern is for children it makes no attempt to prevent the dissolution of childless marriages.109 Discussing “Woman in 2030,” Lord Birkenhead likewise predicted that if the family were to survive, limitations would have to be imposed on female intellect. He assumed that maternity would be policed yet said nothing about any changes in men's parenting.110

Wells's notion of the endowment of motherhood was a form of positive eugenics. (p.27) genics. In futurist literature, the fertility of the superior classes was policed by both carrots and sticks. George Godwin mused that the state might interfere in reproduction, by penalizing the fit who refused to breed.111 The biologist Julian Huxley (Aldous Huxley's brother) noted that the complaint that the best did not breed sufficiently showed the need for tax reform and a racial health service.112 Birkenhead predicted gene research would lead those considering marriage to question each other's heredity before proposing. “This is the kind of eugenics which will develop in the future, rather than the absurdities of the human stud-farm which so many earnest, and generally unmarried, enthusiasts at present predict.”113 He declared it a “reasonable and even romantic” idea.

Eugenic preoccupations led futurist writers to focus on the issue of differential fertility: the problem of the right types of people having too few children and the wrong kinds too many. “The human race is now passing through a biological crisis unprecedented in the history of life.”114 So asserted Blacker in his 1926 tract arguing in favor of eugenic legislation that would restrict the fertility of the unfit. How would the state carry out such a policy of negative eugenics? Preventing the unfit from marrying was difficult, and segregating them prohibitively expensive. By the twentieth century, however, doctors could provide male sterilizations through the simple means of the vasectomy, thus making the forcible limitation of the fertility of the unfit a real possibility.

Futurist writers found it difficult to avoid the notion that the unproductive would eventually be eliminated. H. G. Wells was particularly prone to harp on the degenerationist threat. In last section of Anticipations (1901), Wells hails Malthus as the revolutionary who had ended an era of facile optimism that had believed in biological equality. In the future, experts had to rule, and the unfit had to be eliminated. “It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental in the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity.”115 In the New Republic, whatever advances the procreation of the fit and retards that of the diseased—even mercy killings—is good. The unfit will be punished for reproducing, and inferior races kept out.116

Such ideas were contagious and not surprisingly drew the support of social conservatives. According to Birkenhead, a future society had to have specific types of citizens. “The indiscriminate increase of the most useless type of citizen, accompanied by the voluntary sterilisation of the best type, is the greatest menace which (p.28) threatens our civilization.”117 In his account of the future of crime, George Godwin protested that sterilization and “painless elimination” were shirked by sentimentalists, yet such policies would protect the greatest number. The degenerate were fertile as weeds, and the taxation costs of supporting such “sub-men” actually had the effect of sterilizing the fit who had to restrict their family size. Though opposed to capital punishment, Godwin applauded the elimination of threats to the race. “In the future,” he predicted, “we shall probably regard it as a meritorious act on the part of a mother that she destroys at birth, say, a Mongol idiot.”118

Among the bleakest eugenic accounts of the future was the philosopher F. C. S. Schiller's Tantalus; or, The Future of Man (1924), which claimed that evolution was being reversed, the higher classes failing to reproduce, while the feebleminded and casual laborers spawned huge broods. The dysgenic effect was compounded by the government preventing the poor from having access to birth control and by medicine and philanthropy thoughtlessly engaging in “baby-saving,” that is, rescuing infants who should not have survived. If such actions continued, Schiller foresaw the race likely to peter out “in an overwhelming flood of feeble-mindedness.” Eugenic sterilization was needed. Countering Russell's worries about the tyranny of science, Schiller asserted that such interventions would begin cautiously. “We start with a pretty shrewd suspicion that certain types, say the feeble-minded, the sickly, the insane, are undesirable, and that no good can come from coddling and cultivating them.”119 At the same time, to restart evolution, various “experiments” would be undertaken to increase the fertility of the superior classes. Norman Haire, in his account of the future of marriage, made much the same arguments as Schiller. Haire described the possibility of sterilizations being carried out by x-rays, superheating of the gonads, or some form of immunization. He foresaw the unhealthy being ordered to use contraceptives. If they disobeyed, the offspring would be aborted or the decision made after birth if it should be allowed to live. Indeed he foresaw in a future society the establishment of boards that would decide on eugenic grounds on “painlessly destroying persons who are a menace to it.”120

Science-fiction writers found it difficult to dream up scenarios bleaker than those produced by the eugenicists, but they tried. Olaf Stapledon, in Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1931), argued that with humanitarianism in vogue the unsound reproduced rottenness. In Frederick le Gros Clarke's uninspiring novel Between Two Men (1935), an embryologist declares that the species is unstable and wearing out; a new one will emerge, the Übermensch will appear, and the unfit perish.121

Progressive writers were aware that the specter of biological degeneration was exploited by social conservatives. Vernon Lee noted that the public was bombarded (p.29) daily with reports of new threats, and not just by blacks, Jews, Bolsheviks, and fascists. “There is Peril from the multiplication of Idiots and the multiplication of Supermen; Peril from depopulation and Peril from overpopulation, from unsexed women and over-sexed women; Peril from over-much altruism, and Peril from insufficient altruism.”122 The fate that awaited a society that fell to the eugenicists was presented by Sydney Fowler Wright in his 1929 short story “PN 40.” He portrayed a repressive “Eugenic Era” in which the unfit are forbidden to marry while a board of allocation arranges the polygamous marriages of the fit. Women are married off early and rewarded with a medal for each child they have. A young woman called PN 40 is drawn to 48 VC, but as he is allowed only one-quarter of a wife, the couples' happiness depends on their escaping to Brazil.123

Despite sharing Wright's distaste for eugenics, many writers on the left found it difficult not to believe that science would eventually solve society's social ills. Dora Russell insisted that workers would be just as good as the middle classes if they had the same food and training. Poor conditions led to feebleness of mind. Accordingly while arguing that workers needed access to birth control, she insisted that the large working-class family did not pose a threat.124 Enid Charles agreed that the alarmist assertions of eugenists were unproven. They failed to see that most defectives were born to normal parents, so it was quite wrong to talk about an increase in defective stock. Yet Charles still spoke of the “quality” of the population and conceded that the encouragement of “socially valuable” stocks was important.125 Charlotte Haldane asserted that intelligence was inherited, but that it needed a good environment if it were to flourish. It made better sense therefore to seek to improve the environment than follow the policies espoused by eugenic cranks with their obvious class and race prejudices. Yet she could at the same time argue that the eugenicists were right in supporting the sterilization of the handicapped: “As far as I can see, there is no reason whatever why such people should be allowed to reproduce, though all sexual intercourse need not necessarily be denied them if the community does not suffer by it.”126

Her husband, the Cambridge scientist J. B. S. Haldane, presented the spread of contraceptives as an example of the practical application of biology gone stupidly awry: “The result is that the only means available of regulating population, a means which might be of immense social value if it were directed, is allowed to be used in the most haphazard and unsatisfactory manner.”127 Turning to sterilization, Haldane ridiculed the eugenic “off-with-your cock-brigade” and the Nazi fanatics, but still had faith in the emergence of an ultimately benign eugenics.128 Scientific reasoning had to win out eventually. Bertrand Russell took a similar stance, asserting that, “government opposition to birth-control propaganda gives (p.30) a biological advantage to stupidity, since it is chiefly stupid people whom governments succeed in keeping in ignorance. Before long, birth-control may become nearly universal among the white races; it will then not deteriorate their quality, but only diminish their numbers, at a time when uncivilized races are still prolific and are preserved from a high death-rate by white science.”129 Russell accepted that eventually sterilizations would have a role to play. “We may perhaps assume that, if people grow less superstitious, governments will acquire the right to sterilize those who are not desirable as parents.” One could start with imbeciles, then epileptics, consumptives, dipsomaniacs, and finally “all who fail to pass the usual school examinations.”130 Though he conceded that a few geniuses would be lost, he believed average intelligence would improve.

Julian Huxley was skeptical of many of the eugenicists' claims, and noted that environmental influences could mask genetic variations, but he too accepted the argument that the lower classes were too fertile. They needed birth control; unless they had small families, they should be prevented from having easy access to relief or hospitals. Long unemployment he suggested be made grounds for sterilization.131 J. D. Bernal, another leftist scientist disdainful of the eugenicists and faddists who judged social worth on externals, nevertheless accepted the need to control population. He foresaw that “the better organized beings will be obliged in self-defense to reduce the numbers of the others, until they are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them.”132 Indeed he playfully speculated that the day might come when the enlightened moved to other planets leaving the earth as a sort of zoo for misfits.133 All these writers were clearly motivated by both a faith in science and a fear of the masses.

It was in this cultural context that some sketched out the possibility of ectogenesis.134 The necessity of attempting to restrict the fertility of some citizens could be preempted if the reproduction of all was controlled by the state. This was Huxley's vision of babies in bottles, a logical if outlandish response to on the one hand a series of threats to reproduction including undisciplined women and emasculated men and on the other hand the prospect of racial improvements promised by eugenicists, biologists, and medical scientists. The fascination with the idea of a scientist creating life can be traced at least as far back as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1817). Fact began to catch up with fantasy when in Britain in the 1890s the Cambridge scientist Walter Heape carried out the artificial insemination of rabbits and the transfer of their fertilized eggs.135 At about the same time in America, the press portrayed Jacques Loeb as a “Dr. Frankenstein” when news leaked out of his work on “artificial parthenogenesis.” Though Loeb's notoriety was won by his simply stimulating sea urchin eggs to begin development, (p.31) an 1899 account presented him as attempting “to create Life in a Test Tube” while another was titled the “Creation of Life.”136 Similar powers were attributed to the French researcher Alexis Carrel who in the early twentieth century moved from cell research and organ transplants to preserving grafts.137

In a 1914 lecture, J. B. S. Haldane captured the optimism of biologists, aware that they were participating in a radical new shift in the relationships between humans, plants, and animals.138 This lecture was the basis of a small book, Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1924), in which he asserted that the current progress of medicine promised to rival in its social impact that of the Industrial Revolution. The Great War had raised the threat that science might destroy man or make him a “mere parasite of machinery, an appendage to the reproductive system of huge and complicated engines.”139 As scientific progress could not be stopped, the challenge, according to Haldane, was how best to apply biology to human life. Most foresaw only a few changes in medicine and eugenics, but in Daedalus Haldane set his sights higher. He imagines an undergraduate 150 years hence, looking back on a world transformed by remarkable scientific achievements. The first ectogenetic child is born in 1951—the result of Heape's transfer of rabbit embryos, Haldane's 1925 work on embryonic rats, and the ability of scientists of the 1950s to keep ovaries alive, harvest their eggs, and fertilize them.140 At midcentury, sexual love and reproduction are finally split, with only 30 percent of babies born of woman.141 Such reproduction by design proves to have obvious social benefits. “Had it not been for ectogenesis,” we are told, “there can be little doubt that civilisation would have collapsed within a measurable time owing to the greater fertility of the less desirable members of the population in almost all countries.”142 In short, thanks to science the race is both changed and improved.

In producing his account of how test-tube babies would soon be produced, Haldane was provocatively portraying the biologist as the most romantic and most blasphemous of figures. Every new invention or discovery—even milking a cow—had been initially damned as a “perversion,” as “indecent and unnatural,” he noted, but eventually was normalized. So too, he asserted, thanks to the biological sciences, sex and the family would inevitably be reformulated. Even before the appearance of Daedalus, Haldane's disturbing views were being publicized. In his comic novel Crome Yellow (1921), Aldous Huxley has Scogans—a character based on Haldane—declare his unbounded faith in scientific progress:

With the gramophone, the cinema, and the automatic pistol, the goddess of Applied Science has presented the world with another gift, more precious (p.32) even than these—the means of dissociating love from propagation. Eros, for those who wish it, is now an entirely free god; his deplorable associations with Lucina may be broken at will. In the course of the next few centuries, who knows? The world may see a more complete severance…. An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.143

Haldane's sketch of ectogenesis inspired a number of more serious writers including leftists such as the crystallographer J. D. Bernal, the sexologist Norman Haire, and the geneticist H. J. Muller.144 Haldane's vision also met with a range of critical responses. Skeptics included such futurists as E. E. Fournier d'Albe. While noting Haldane's ectogenesis, he held that though in coming decades the forms of marriage might change, parenthood would not.145

In Icarus; or, The Future of Science (1924), Bertrand Russell, worried that biological discoveries would be used by the elite to control the masses, questioned Haldane's optimism. Russell was of two minds concerning the control of reproduction. Sheep were scientifically bred, and the idea of applying such measures to humans had its appeal. “The study of heredity may in time make eugenics an exact science, and perhaps we shall in a later age be able to determine at will the sex of our children.”146 However, such interventions could have disastrous unintended consequence, such as a surplus of male babies. Nevertheless Russell accepted that “it may easily be that within the next hundred years the sciences of heredity and bio-chemistry will have made such strides as to make possible the breeding of a race which everybody would admit to be superior to that now existing.”147 Though he found the idea repugnant, he also conceded that only a small percentage of breeders would be necessary. In theory, one could have a society of Edisons with the strength of prizefighters, but Russell warned that once science knew more about reproduction, it would interfere more in family life than religion had ever done. “Nevertheless,” he concluded, “if there is to be a tyranny, it is better that it should be scientific.”148

Russell pushed his message further in The Scientific Outlook (1931), noting that the Soviet Union was demonstrating how malleable people were. Reproduction was now controlled, and sex selection was inevitable. With the increased policing of reproduction, he foresaw the possibility of only about 5 percent of men (p.33) and 25 percent of women being selected as breeders; the rest could be sterilized. Though the breeders would each have eight to nine children, they would have no other work. He mused that artificial impregnation might be employed to such an extent that eventually it would be not “ladylike” to be impregnated in “natural manner.” And if mothering was largely replaced by incubators and nurses, fatherhood would all but disappear.149 Was this socially desirable? Bertrand Russell foresaw eugenics remaking maternity. “Moral standards may alter so as to make it possible for one man to be the sire of a vast progeny by many different mothers.”150 Yet Russell continued to voice his concern that any system run by officials and doctors would unlikely be wiser than nature.151

Julian Huxley turned to fiction to warn of the dangers of scientific hubris. In his story “The Tissue Culture King” (1926), he tells of a captured medical scientist who works for an African tribal chief by exploiting tissue cultures, experimental embryology, endocrine treatments, and parthenogenesis to produce freakish men and animals. He succeeds in reproducing birds and reptiles by parthenogenesis, but escapes before being forced to create humans.152 In presenting a frightening vision of the excesses to which the reproductive sciences might lead, Huxley echoed H. G. Wells's cautionary tale The Island of Dr. Moreau.

A misogynist like the conservative social critic Anthony Ludovici who paraded his hostility to the “artificial”—including spectacles, forceps, and baby food—was predictably hostile to Haldane's vision. According to Ludovici, women and scientists were alike in despising the body. Doctors already interfered in the birthing process. In the future, he foresaw politically empowered feminists, not satisfied with having pushed back the age of consent to thirty-five or forty, happily embracing ectogenesis. “When once artificial impregnation is an everyday occurrence, a Parliament of women will doubtless pass legislation to make it illegal for any man to procreate a child naturally, if it is the wife's desire to have one by the intermediation of science.”153 First, the naturally fertilized will be despised. Next, extracorporeal gestation (following Carrel's work) via a cow or ass will be possible. Children, Ludovici predicted, would be “grown” in incubators by the local council. Only a small number of men would be needed for fertilization; most would be superfluous. And once women were in power, he asserted, “rape will be punished brutally probably by means of emasculations; and men of vigorous sexuality will be eliminated in order to make way for a generation of low-sexed, meek, and sequacious lackeys.”154 Owen Johnson's novel The Coming of the Amazons (1931) aped Ludovici's warning in portraying a society in which women were flat chested (as they no longer nursed) and bald (because they were so intelligent). The state, following eugenic guidelines, created specific castes, forbade (p.34) families, made birth control obligatory, and determined the sex of children who were raised in nurseries. Women, being in power, made the sexual advances, and men were eliminated after their services as breeders were concluded. The story ends with “John,” the narrator, futilely trying to rouse the men to rebel.155

Birkenhead concurred that in a society in which marriage and reproduction were split, the “feminist dream of equality” would finally be achieved. Freed of childbearing, women could decide on whether or not to adopt ectogenetic babies. The foster mother would be prompted by science to produce milk and emotions “as though she had herself borne it.”156 The woman with a genius for mothering might adopt a huge brood; others, if they chose a career, might have none. Birkenhead argued that as ectogenetic birthing could trump eugenic concerns about breeding, it was likely to occur. The state could then determine the choice of parents. “The Cabinet of the future could breed a nation of industrious dullards, or leaven the population with fifty thousand irresponsible, if gifted, mural painters.”157 It would naturally breed those it “needs.” Workers would not be slaves since like worker bees their happiness would be found in working. In fact, in a machine age there would be little work to do, and the challenge (as in Brave New World) would be how to fill leisure time.

What did women think of such scenarios? Although as a feminist she was exactly the sort of woman Ludovici abhorred, Charlotte Haldane expressed similar eugenic concerns in her contribution to the discussion. In her futurist novel Man's World (1926), white males control women's sex and reproduction. The twenty-first-century government decides how many children will be born. Geneticists apply a method of sex selection while Motherhood Councils are in charge of matings. Youths are married off early; women either become mothers or are “immunized” to protect the race from haphazard breeding. In the old days, all women were forced into motherhood, though many became neurotic as a result. Now only the healthy are destined for motherhood; the neuters are not. Moreover the mothers of the “white race” are not expected to be full-time wives. They have only one primary task, that of “race-production,” which is carried out in maternal settlements. Birth control has been followed by “sex control,” meaning women now impose their will on men. This society of mothers has its mechanical slaves, neuters, and, as in Rome, “entertainers” to deal with men's lust. Haldane thus foresees women outgrowing the Christian family, and she has a male scientist predict that ultimately ectogenesis will spare most women even childbearing.158

Like Charlotte Haldane, other feminists were ambivalent about talk of scientists assuming a greater control of reproduction.159 In her discussion of threats to (p.35) population growth, Enid Charles cited J. B. S. Haldane's discussion of test-tube babies and warned that his vision was closer to being realized than some might think. Rabbit embryos were already being cultured in vitro and implanted. Sex determination and artificial insemination would be soon possible for humans. It was even possible to envisage parthenogenesis, in which males would not be needed and twins rather than single babies might be preferred.160 In Halcyon; or, The Future of Monogamy, Vera Brittain agreed that ectogenesis would eventually take place but felt it would be limited to prevent the “demolition of the human race.”161

Huxley's Brave New World described a society that pushed to its logical conclusion the eugenic desire to produce standardized humans. It is necessarily inegalitarian, likened by the Controller Mustapha Mond to an iceberg with eight-ninths of its mass below the waterline. In this world, class becomes biology, with each individual designed for their particular task. Repetitive factory work is impossible for the intelligent Alpha but fine for the moronic Epsilon. Accordingly, the development of some test-tube babies is subjected to cell division and retardation to provide standardized workers or “identical machines.”162 The same argument against social leveling was made by Blacker. There was no point in educating those who had to do the dirty work: “It is doubtful whether the possession of a very high degree of intelligence would make such workers happier or more efficient.”163

Such a vision had its critics. The leftist biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham protested that Huxley revealed himself to be too Platonic in his hankering after a slave society. Instead of having to rely on morons, a truly advanced community would make work so interesting that it would need the more intelligent.164 Though not opposed in principle to the creation of an ectogenetic labor force, Birkenhead predicted it would not be necessary as “production will become so cheap, and, barring political or international upheavals, wealth will accumulate to such an extent, that the ectogenetic Robot will never be needed.”165 References to ectogenesis naturally enough cropped up in subsequent science-fiction works. In the year 20,000 AD, society has its “breeding racks” of babies in bottles in Laurence Manning's The Man Who Awoke (1933).166 In Odd John (1935), Olaf Stapledon foresaw colonies of “supernormals” reserving sex for love and reproducing via ectogenetically fertilized ova.167

Why did these discussions of ectogenesis emerge when they did? They were obviously fueled by reports of breakthroughs being made in the biological sciences, but more important, they were also a response to worrying shifts in gender relations and apparent threats to population. Such works bear out Fredric (p.36) Jameson's assertion that science fiction's chief ability is “to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future.”168 George Woodcock agrees that “though Brave New World is projected on to the screen of the future, it is derived almost entirely from tendencies which Huxley observed with alarm and distrust in the world around him.”169

If Huxley's portrayal of reproduction in the future was, because of his wit and stylistic accomplishments, the most memorable, it was not all that original. Critics claimed he was simply a popularizer of ideas. “On inspection,” sniffed Q. D. Leavis, “his learning is found to be painlessly acquired like his information from such obvious sources as encyclopeadias, the scientific best-sellers, the current popular sociological, psychological, anthropological, etc works.” Of course, for that very reason Huxley is a good guide to his age, and even Leavis conceded Huxley had a “flair for embodying the Zeitgeist.”170 In Brave New World, an American reviewer noted, Huxley held up a mirror to the age: “the standardized world we are facing and fearing, a world made safe by science and psychology as they are promoted by the eugenicist and the behaviourist.”171

For the purposes of this study, Huxley is important in simply being the best known of the many writers of his generation who, in writing about the future of reproduction, were torn between an admiration for planning and a distrust of the powers of science. Such works are obviously of little value if judged on their authors' abilities to predict what would happen in the year 1977 or 2020 or 2073 or 20,000. The interest of these books really lies in revealing how, in purportedly anticipating a world to come, cultural commentators transparently drew on contemporary worries about the impact a machine-dominated society was already having on sex, gender, and fertility