Event Title

Eugenics and Motherhood: Margaret Sanger's Work and the Rhetoric of Motherhood

Presenter Information

Samantha Jones, Colby CollegeFollow

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

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Apr 30th, 9:00 AM Apr 30th, 11:55 AM

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