ABSTRACT
Eugenics offered a way of dealing with poverty which would avoid active class-conflict or housing reform; if the poor were bred out, they would not need houses. Eugenic feminism—a strand of feminism peculiar to the middle classes—not only appeared to offer a panacea for poverty; it also promised middle-class women a new social function and even a cure for ennui. Sarah Grand, new woman and best-selling social purity feminist, sought through her writing to alter the breeding patterns of the nation. ‘The enthusiasm of humanity,’ he continued, ‘strange as the doctrine may sound, has to be directed primarily to the future of our race, and only secondarily to the wellbeing of our contemporaries. The debates about nature, society, and freedom that found heated expression in the press in the closing years of the nineteenth century were too energetic, complex, and diverse to produce simple solutions to the questions of sex and gender, housing, poverty, and eugenics that dogged the period.
