Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit, The.
Woodhull, Victoria. The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit. London and New York: [Privately Printed], 1891.
8vo.; wrappers; sewn; small abrasion to cover, repaired; “34819” discretely stamped. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition; published under the name “Victoria C. Woodhull Martin.”
A remarkable, and rather chilling pamphlet elaborating on Woodhull’s fear of the gap in reproduction rates between the upper and lower classes. Its thirty-seven pages bespeak the gulf between 18th-century universal benevolence and late 19th-century social Darwinism. Woodhull views the proliferation of the “unfit”—the domestic equivalent to the international specter of the “rising tide of color”—as a menace to society, and attributes it to social evils such as class barriers, sexual repression, and the capitalist system with its tendency towards unethical competition and concentration of ownership. (Half-way through her argument she calls attention to “the rapid multiplication of the negroes in America, who at some not far distant day will outnumber and overrun the whites if the rapid increase be not checked” [p. 18].)
Woodhull’s argument, essentially, is this: There is a class of people who are physiologically inferior. These individuals, and even those who are not genetically disagreeable, are subjected to deplorable working and living conditions, which engender physiological and moral defects, which are passed on to their children. “Poor people, as a class,” she writes, “are organically deficient; they inherit defective, ill-regulated nervous systems, or their nervous systems become badly adjusted through irregular habits, bad training, or diseases¼” (pp. 14-15). She clearly acknowledges both genetic and environmental causes for the gulf between the fit and the unfit, those with “more highly evolved” versus those with “defective” nervous systems, and quotes extensively from Michael Foster’s Text Book on Physiology to back up such claims as “To arouse dull or stupid people it requires a stronger stimulus than it requires for normal individuals” (pp. 7-8). (She later asserts that the unfit “have not a nervous system sufficiently developed to appreciate¼moral checks which would appeal to the superior intellectual mind” (p. 18).)
But despite the direct correlation she makes between urban blight and social ills, rather than advocate labor and social reform, she writes, instead, “¼they must not be bred” (p. 16). Rather than viewing the issue in terms of the individual rights of workers or citizens, she views society as one large organism that needs to amputate its cancerous limbs. She claims that “each one of our human failures adds a considerable item to the burden, already large, put upon the healthy useful citizens,” citing an example of a poor retarded woman who died at the age of 84 at an avoidable cost to “the public purse” of “between £2000 and £3000” (pp. 12-13).
Her discussion of breeding turns to an analysis of marriage and procreation within each class. In the upper classes, “marriage is being deferred more and more, the standard of living is becoming higher among them, and more time is given to education.” On the other hand, “the unfit who are not deterred by any qualms of consciences or apprehension of consequences go on multiplying.” The result? “[A]s the more highly developed are not perpetuated, or if perpetuated it is in fewer numbers, the thoughtless, improvident, degenerate, and diseased, multiply upon us” (p. 17). Some of her insights into the differences between the circumstances under which the rich and poor achieved wedded and parental bliss—not necessarily in that order—deserve consideration. For example, she notes that contraception is more readily available to the upper classes, and that many marriages, even in the upper classes, are inappropriately conceived. “How many opportunities has a girl to find her physiological mate in her little set—even if she were free to choo
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