Event Title
Eugenics and Motherhood: Margaret Sanger's Work and the Rhetoric of Motherhood
Location
Diamond 123
Start Date
30-4-2015 9:00 AM
End Date
30-4-2015 11:55 AM
Project Type
Presentation
Description
I want to focus on how Sanger's rhetoric revealed both classed and raced preferences for family structure, thus building the ideal American mother as an unattainable image for a number of women on a number of different yet intersecting levels. While perhaps in and of itself this paper does not sound highly original, it will work differently from other aspects of scholarship on Sanger and the history of eugenics in America because it will analyze and work through the various racialized and classed claims that helped American women win birth control with a lens that is trained on the ideals of motherhood, thus flipping the way conversations on eugenics and society usually work by trying to keep the private, female sphere at the head of the conversation instead of privileging the public sphere where the conversation on policy and campaigning was happening.
Faculty Sponsor
Sonja Thomas
Sponsoring Department
Colby College. Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program
CLAS Field of Study
Interdisciplinary Studies
Event Website
http://www.colby.edu/clas
ID
1004
Eugenics and Motherhood: Margaret Sanger's Work and the Rhetoric of Motherhood
Diamond 123
I want to focus on how Sanger's rhetoric revealed both classed and raced preferences for family structure, thus building the ideal American mother as an unattainable image for a number of women on a number of different yet intersecting levels. While perhaps in and of itself this paper does not sound highly original, it will work differently from other aspects of scholarship on Sanger and the history of eugenics in America because it will analyze and work through the various racialized and classed claims that helped American women win birth control with a lens that is trained on the ideals of motherhood, thus flipping the way conversations on eugenics and society usually work by trying to keep the private, female sphere at the head of the conversation instead of privileging the public sphere where the conversation on policy and campaigning was happening.
https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/clas/2015/program/394