8) The future is female: feminism, spirituality, eugenics
The Spiritual Eugenics project explores the overlap between New Age spirituality and eugenics (for a definition of those terms go here).
My thesis is that, in New Age teachings, one often meets the idea that a spiritual elite are evolving into superhumans, while others are failing the evolutionary test and these failures should perhaps be sterilized or even exterminated.
Because a form of spiritual eugenics was embraced by the Nazis, it can be assumed that spiritual eugenics is always white supremacist, patriarchal and fascist. But in fact, there are different varieties of spiritual eugenics: feminist, socialist, queer, deep ecological and transhumanist, for example. Today, we’re going to look at the overlap between feminism, spirituality and eugenics in the 1880s to 1940s.
Why is there an overlap between feminism, spirituality and eugenics?
To break the question down, first of all let’s look at the overlap between first-wave feminism and the occult revival of the late 19th century. Nineteenth-century New Age movements like Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were popular with feminists because these movements rejected the patriarchy of Christianity, and sometimes worshipped a female deity, like Isis or the Shekhinah. They promoted gender equality: women enjoyed leadership positions in these movements, indeed, they were often founded by women. Spiritualism was begun by the Fox sisters in 1848, the Theosophical Society was founded by Madame Blavatsky in 1875, and Christian Science was founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879.
In addition, some people (both men and women) argued that women were essentially more spiritual than men, more intuitive, more attuned to the spirit world. Most Spiritualist mediums were women, for example. Professor Joy Dixon has chronicled how the membership of the Theosophical Society was dominated by women from 1895 to 1925.
Secondly, one can see a lot of overlap between first-wave feminism and the eugenics movement. For example, the Eugenics Education Society was founded in 1907 by a 21-year-old widow, Sybil Gotto, its administration was run by six women, and half of its membership were women. Many leading first-wave feminists — Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, Annie Besant, Victoria Woodhull, the ‘famous five’ of Canadian feminism — were also champions of eugenics.
Why the overlap? First-wave feminists saw sex education and birth control as fundamental to the liberation of women from the burden of endless childbirth and enslavement to the sexual demands and poor sexual hygiene of men. Sex education and birth control were good for women, feminists argued, but also good for the species — they would stop damaged and delinquent children from being born.
The Suffragette movement arose in the late 19th century, at the same time as the eugenics movement, when there was rising concern about the quantity and genetic quality of the human species in general and the white race in particular.
Eugenics gave a cosmic significance to women and motherhood. Women were depicted as ‘mothers of the race’ by eugenic feminists. Women’s choice of mate and skill in child-rearing were supposedly the deciding factor in the evolution of the species. The freer and more informed women’s sexual choices were, the stronger the race would be. British feminist Stella Browne wrote in 1915: ‘Absolute freedom of choice on the woman’s part, and intense desire both for her mate and her child, are the magic forces that will vitalise and transfigure the race’.
These three late-Victorian movements — feminism, spirituality and eugenics — cross-fertilized in interesting and unusual ways. You find feminists arguing that it is women’s cosmic destiny to guide evolution and aid humanity’s ascent into gods. You also find the idea that evolution is culminating in the ‘New Woman’, or superwoman. We’re going to examine the life and ideas of six superwomen, all of whom led unconventional lives, and who developed their own fusion of feminism, spirituality and eugenics.
1) Victoria Woodhull
Victoria Woodhull’s life is so extraordinary it sounds like fiction — indeed, it’s being turned into a film starring Brie Larson, and a TV series starring Katherine Heigl.
Victoria was born in 1838, the seventh of 10 children. She was a teenage Spiritualist medium and clairvoyant, who gave public seances and psychic readings. She claimed to be in touch with various spirits, including Demosthenes, Napoleon and Josephine. At 15 she was married off to a drunken womanizer. They had a mentally-disabled son, and Victoria blamed her marriage and herself for his disability.
She left her husband, and eventually became president of the American Association of Spiritualists and a leading figure in the American Suffragette movement. She was perhaps the most popular speaker in that movement, and an outspoken champion of free love, by which she meant a woman’s right to choose who she has sex with, inside or outside of marriage. She declared:
Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. [The Principles of Social Freedom, 1871]
Any man who did not support the Suffragette movement should, she said, be refused sex: ‘No more sexual intercourse for men who do not fully consent that all women shall be free, and who do not, besides this, also join the standard of the rebellion’.
She was the first woman to run for president, which she did in 1872. She was also the first woman to give testimony to Congress, the first woman to start a Wall Street brokerage, and one of the first woman to own and edit a newspaper.
In her speeches, Spiritualism, feminism and eugenics fuse together in unusual ways. She warned that the world is increasingly filled with morons and delinquents, and the cause is the rotten institution of marriage, which enslaves women to debauched men in loveless marriages. She knows from personal experience that such marriages create dysgenic children like her son:
My boy, now nineteen years of age, who should have been my pride and my joy, has never been blessed by the dawning of reasoning. I was married at fourteen, ignorant of everything that related to my maternal functions. For this ignorance, and because I knew no better than to surrender my maternal functions to a drunken man, I am cursed with this living death. [Tried As By Fire, 1874]
Mothers bear a terrible responsibility for the degeneration of the human race:
How shall I show them the destruction they have sown over the earth; how exhibit the black damnation, the sin, misery, shame, crime, disgrace, that come home to them as mothers; how stab their hearts with the awful monstrosities with which they have desecrated the earth…[Tried As By Fire, 1874]
The solution to this spiritual and biological catastrophe is ‘free love’. Let women freely choose who, when and how they procreate: ‘To woman, by nature, belongs the right of sexual determination’.
Woodhull argued for ‘stirpiculture’, a pre-Galtonian form of eugenics practiced in a mid-19th century spiritual commune called Oneida, in upstate New York. Oneida was a polyamorous community where all reproduction had to be officially approved by the commune leader, who tried to match the fittest parents and produce the most physically and spiritually pure children. Woodhull called Oneida the greatest society on Earth. Only partners who are in love and physically healthy should reproduce, she said:
one half of our sons on reaching manhood are unfit to become fathers, and that one half of our daughters on reaching maturity are unfit to become mothers…The marriages of such individuals produce epileptics, idiots, neurotics, insane inebriates; and by far the larger number become criminals…We see thousands and thousands of parasites born every year who have no means of subsistence, who are destined to fasten upon their fellow-creatures, draining the vitality and strength of the nation, and precipitating its downfall. [Stirpiculture, 1888]
Introducing free love, sex education and eugenics is a spiritual mission. The spirits themselves call for it, Woodhull revealed. She had a trance-induced vision of the future, after an apocalypse where many cities disappear under the sea, in which humans and spirits live together in perfect health and free love.
2) Madame Helena Blavatsky
In 1874, an émigré Russian aristocrat called Madame Helena Blavatsky arrived in the United States and launched a new religious movement that eventually became known as the Theosophical Society. Helena grew up in Yekaterinoslav, married a much-older man when she was 14, ran away, and subsequently travelled the world, acquiring spiritual knowledge. She claimed to have been initiated into a secret order of superhuman beings known as the Masters. Her story sounds like something out of an occult romance by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and in fact, her mother translated Lytton’s novels into Russian, and Helena devoured them as a child.
Madame Blavatsky arrived in the United States at the high-point of Spiritualism’s popularity, but she was dismissive of what she regarded as its amateur fumblings in the spirit world. The true adept, like her, was trained in the occult knowledge of the past, the ‘secret doctrine’ found in all the great religious and magical traditions.
In 1875, Blavatsky and her allies formed the Theosophical Society, announcing its three aims:
1. To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour.
2. To encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science.
3. To investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man.
She and her colleagues then moved to India, establishing a headquarters in Adyar, and Blavatsky set to work condensing her occult knowledge into two enormous books, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888). The Theosophical Society attracted thousands of members, with ‘churches’ all over the world. It proved particularly popular with middle-class women, some of them Suffragettes, who were attracted by its gender egalitarianism, its rejection of Christian patriarchy, and its spiritual elitism.
Blavatsky was not an active Suffragette, but she was aware of the popularity of Theosophy with Suffragettes, and encouraged it. She was a feminist in so far as she challenged Victorian notions of the well-behaved domestic wife, with her free thinking, her drinking and smoking, her rudeness and her rejection of domesticity. She was a feminist in her condemnation of Christian patriarchy and her chutzpah in launching her own religion. In fact, she rejected essentialist definitions of gender and argued that all souls were originally androgynous and would become so again. She seemed to model this ‘divine androgyny’ herself — her nickname was Jack.
While it prided itself on being progressive and cosmopolitan, the Theosophical Society was also quite hierarchical. It was guided by ‘The Masters’, an all-male elite of superhuman beings, who only communicated through Madame Blavatsky. There was also an implicit racial hierarchy in Blavatsky’s teachings. Her books blended together occult wisdom with scientific theories, and she created her own weird version of evolution. She claimed that humanity had evolved through various ‘root races’. Four previous races had arisen and then been almost entirely wiped out, and now a fifth root-race — the Indo-European ‘Aryan race’ — was dominant. It would eventually be superseded by a new and more spiritual race, which would appear in California.
Her ‘spiritual evolution’ theory had a racist shadow-side. Blavatsky suggested some ethnic groups were evolutionary throwbacks. She wrote:
the ‘sacred spark’ is missing in them and it is they who are the only inferior races on the globe, now happily — owing to the wise adjustment of nature which ever works in that direction — fast dying out. [The Secret Doctrine]
In her defence, HPB was not a white supremacist — she suggested white people were less capable of magic than Indians, Tibetans or Arabians, and she often denounced the racism of the English in India. However, her racial theories would be developed into virulently racist forms by later theosophists, particularly in Germany.
3) Annie Besant
After Madame Blavatsky died in 1891, the Theosophical Society split into various factions in the UK, US, Germany and India. Annie Besant emerged as the head of the Society based in India.
Besant is another extraordinary woman. Born into an upper-middle class English family, she married a country vicar when she was 20, but the marriage proved unhappy. Her Tory husband didn’t like her career or her Socialist tendencies. After six years, she left him and started a life of political activism. She campaigned for workers’ rights, atheism and birth control, working closely with Charles Bradlaugh, the first openly-atheist MP. The two were arrested in 1877 for publishing a book on birth control — the 30-year-old Annie gave an impassioned speech, for several days, on the need for birth control to prevent over-population, war, famine, misery, and the degeneration of the species.
For Besant, birth control was a means to female empowerment. It would free women from domestic slavery and enable them to pursue active careers and political lives. But Besant was also a Malthusian and a eugenicist — she and Bradlaugh formed the Malthusian League in 1877, to campaign to reduce the quantity and improve the quality of the human race.
In 1889, Besant reviewed Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, and was so impressed she converted to Theosophy, to the shock of her atheist colleagues. She was persuaded by Blavatsky to abandon her Malthusian-eugenicist campaigning, and instead embrace Theosophy’s own brand of spiritual eugenics. In books and lectures like The Coming Race (1916) and Man: Whence, How and Whither (co-written with fellow Theosophist Charles Leadbeater in 1913), Besant outlined her theory of evolution.
She believed in an ‘Occult Hierarchy, which guides and shapes evolution’ led by the Hindu god Manu, who supposedly created the Indian caste system. According to Besant, ‘The great work of the Manu is the building up of a Race, and its sub-races, and families, and nations, and He is at work now’. Like Blavatsky, Besant believed in a racial hierarchy. She thought Chinese and Japanese people were part of the ‘fourth root-race’, now superseded by the fifth root-race of Indo-European Aryans, who would eventually rule the world in an expanded version of the British Empire. An even higher race of human is now emerging in California, she believed. Indeed, when she visited California, she could observe examples of this new species:
The forehead is large, the eyes large and well set, face exceedingly well cut, and rather reminding one of the Greek type; the chin more square and strong, the mouth finely cut, rather a thin upper lip. [The Coming Race]
It was the cosmic mission of the Theosophical Society to support the evolution of this Coming Race. In the coming centuries, the new superhumans would draw together in southern California, under the banner of the Theosophical Society, and form an elite caste, only breeding with each other. All marriages would be approved by Manu.
Meanwhile, the ‘failures’ of spiritual evolution will be swept away in wars and cataclysms. This is all part of the cosmic plan. There is nothing sad or evil in the genocide of savages, for example: ‘From the higher stand-point, a stage had been reached beyond which these savages were incapable of advancing’. Besant walks through the slums of England, and imagines a genocide clearing away the scum. She writes in Evolution of Life and Form (1899):
Sometimes I have felt… when in the pursuance of my duty, I have gone with breaking heart through the slums of eastern and southern London, or through those of Glasgow, or Edinburgh, or Sheffield, as I have noted the types of men and women around me, as I have seen the human almost veiled by the brute… that nothing save the destruction of the forms could give any hope for those imprisoned with them; that for those men and women, as they were, degraded, brutal, drunken, profligate, their very forms with the impress of the animal, the best mercy that God could show them would be an earthquake that would swallow the whole great city….
This, of course, would be an act of mercy, as it would free the souls trapped in these degraded forms for a new and better incarnation.
4) Florence Farr
Florence Farr, who we met briefly in chapter four, was an actress, model, singer, writer and occultist. She was one of the senior members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. She also wrote articles for the Theosophical Society’s publications and for The New Age.
Farr was the archetypal New Woman of first-wave feminism. She declared: ‘This is to be the Woman’s Century. In it she is to awake from her long sleep and come into her kingdom’. Hers was a spiritual feminism. She rejected the patriarchy of Judeo-Christianity with strident anti-Semitism, declaring in Modern Woman: Her Intentions (1910):
I want the women who read this book…to look forward to the great century that is waiting for their alchemy, to transmute its life by giving it a more intent purpose… [women should] make a fight against the patriarchal faith of the goat-worshippers [ie Jews].
She was also a eugenicist. Her father William Farr was a public health bureaucrat and early adopter of eugenics (before Galton had even coined the term), and Florence developed her own occult eugenics, suggesting in an article in The New Age that humanity would only become perfect ‘when a race of magicians hypnotise the innocent young into willing their own perfection’. This seems to be a similar idea as one finds in Theosophy — an occult elite acts as mediums for eugenic spirits, who guide humanity’s evolution into gods.
While Farr never had children herself, she imparts advice as to how to be a good mother in order to produce the fittest children. She suggests, for example, that expectant mothers could be surrounded by the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Burne-Jones to encourage the growth of spiritual children (she was one of Burne-Jones’ models, so perhaps she saw this as a way to create clones of herself).
Burne-Jones’ Golden Stair, for which Florence Farr modelled
This sort of advice to mothers was quite common among spiritual-feminist-eugenicists. One finds it in Call of the Mother (1926), by Lady Emily Lutyens. Emilly, the grand-daughter of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, was a Suffragette and eugenicist who converted to vegetarianism and Theosophy. In Call of the Mother, Lady Emily declares it is the sacred vocation of mothers to produce ‘a race of gods and heroes’. For this task, mothers should be supported by the state and educated in eugenics and sexual hygiene. Lutyens quotes a message from one of Theosophy’s spirit-guides, who declares: ‘woman’s mission is to become the mother of future occultists — of those who will be born without sin’.
Florence Farr, however, was not a mother and did not think women’s spiritual mission ended with motherhood. The ultimate aim of the adept is the perfection of themselves through the attainment of super-woman consciousness. In a review in The New Age, she wrote:
This state of consciousness, now identified by leading modern thinkers as the state called superman, is mystically feminine. It is Isis, who will bring forth Horus the Saviour; in later systems, the virgin of the world; the wisdom praised by the writer of Ecclesiastes. It has often been said jokingly that Superman is Woman; but it is only woman in her symbolic sense of wisdom as the field of the new birth we all await [Superman Consciousness, The New Age, 1907]
She was not the only feminist to blend feminism with the Nietzschean cult of the superman, and to see the New Woman as the aim and goal of evolution. A feminist journal called the London Freewoman also called for the rise of a new aristocracy of superwomen. As one Freewoman contributor put it, woman was destined ‘to realize in herself the highest and best of which humanity is capable; to become in the dim distance of time a being higher in type than man and further removed’.
This idea — that superwomen are the goal of evolution — was at the heart of the feminist eugenics of Theosophist Frances Swiney.
5) Frances Swiney
Frances was born in 1847 in India, the daughter of a major in the Raj. She married another major, then went home to Cheltenham with their children. He followed a decade later. Of all the ‘superwomen’ I’ve described, Swiney had the most conventional life and the most unconventional views. Despite her establishment background, she was a fierce Suffragette feminist. She declared:
The Woman’s Era is dawning…The flow of the human tide has set in towards fairer shores, and bears triumphantly on its crest the womanhood of the world. [The Awakening of Women]
She was also a member of the Malthusian League and the Eugenics Education Society, and she was a Theosophist and occultist. She brought these spiritual-feminist-eugenicist interests together in the League of Isis, an organization she launched to promote sex education for mothers, and veneration of the Divine Mother.
Swiney was a female supremacist and gynocrat (ie she advocated rule by women). She thought women are the superior gender in just about every sense. She wrote in The Awakening of Women (1899): ‘the female organization is the one of which Nature has bestowed most care, prevision, and attention, and has been, so to speak, her first and her last love….’
Women live longer than men, they have greater recuperative powers, a higher tolerance for pain, a bigger brain, more occult powers. Woman ‘discovered fire, invented pottery, all the textile industries owe their origin to her busy brain and fingers. She was the first agriculturist, the first physician, the first linguist, the first theologian…’. In short, woman is the ‘true human’.
Men, meanwhile, are an ‘excrescence’, a ‘superfluity’, a ‘waste’, more prone to idiocy and insanity, more aggressive and war-like, more primitive. In a word, ‘evil’. This is proved by the latest science. Men are responsible for racial and species degeneration — they force themselves on women, especially their hapless wives, they spread venereal diseases, and they miscegenate. As a daughter and wife of the Raj, Swiney saves her fiercest contempt for white men who have sex with other races:
the Aryan male has never failed to have relations with the lowest and most disgusting females of the most degraded races among whom his lot may be cast for the time being…Women, on the other hand, have seldom willingly descended to unions with men of a lower race…and it is to the influence of the white woman in the future, that we must look for the encouragement of that high and pure morality which will restrain the conquering white man from becoming the progenitor of racial crossing with a lower and degraded type…
We’re reminded of William Dalrymple’s observation that the Raj became far more racist when British wives came out to join their husbands, and forbade any socialising with Indians or Anglo-Indian half-castes.
Swiney is a devotee of spiritual evolution. Nature is ‘the Divine Mother’. She is Isis, Ishtar, Demeter, Sophia. The male God of the Old Testament is a phony, a ‘world fabricator’. Advanced souls are now waking up to the Divine Feminine. This worship of a female deity can be found in other feminists of the era, by the way — the American Suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage launched their own ‘Women’s Bible’ and sometimes started meetings with a prayer to a female deity.
For Swiney, the goddess of Natural Evolution works through women’s sexual choice. The freer they are in their choice, the higher the species will rise. Science should also guide reproduction — all parents should get approval from a physician before they reproduce.
Gradually, the ultimate aim and purpose of the Goddess Evolution is becoming clear — the perfection of Woman, and the disappearance of men. The women of the future will reproduce through ‘parthenogenesis’ (the spontaneous development of an embryo from an unfertilized egg) and men will no longer be necessary. Men are, in fact, becoming increasingly feminized and will gradually turn into women.
This idea of a female-only future utopia appears in some novels of the era, such as Herland, a 1915 novel by the American spiritual-feminist-eugenicist Charlotte Perkins Gillman. It also appears in our final superwoman.
6) Wonder Woman
Wonder Woman, the most successful female superhero ever created, first appeared in the pages of All-Star Comics in 1941, as the princess of a tribe of Amazon women with magical powers. Wonder Woman was created by Harvard psychologist William Moulton Marston. As was uncovered recently by historian Jill Lepore, Wonder Woman was inspired by Margaret Sanger, the feminist, birth control activist and eugenicist.
William Marston lived in a love triangle with his wife and another woman, Olive Byrne, who was Margaret Sanger’s niece. Marston was a big fan of Sanger’s ideas and drew on them for the creation of his superwoman. He said: ‘Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.’
For the first draft, he wrote: ‘The NEW WOMEN thus freed and strengthened by supporting themselves (on Paradise Island) developed enormous physical and mental power.’
When a new writer was hired to work on the comic, Byrne gave them a copy of her aunt Margaret’s book, Women and the New Race. The book begins:
The most far-reaching social development of modern times is the revolt of women against sex servitude. The most important force in the remaking of the world is a free motherhood.
Freeing women from sex servitude through sex education and birth control will, Sanger argued, empower them to take an equal part in world affairs. But it will also improve the species eugenically. Sanger supported the sterilization of the ‘unfit’ (as did her lover, HG Wells), and she also proposed a moratorium on new births for 10 years. Just like Sanger, Wonder Woman fought for equal rights for women, although the superheroine is less vocal about eugenics.
In this chapter, we’ve explored the overlap between feminism, spirituality and eugenics. We’ve seen how feminist-eugenicists celebrated women’s central role in spiritual evolution, either as ‘mothers of the race’, or as high priestesses channeling the evolutionary instructions of the spirit world, or as the superwomen of a gynocratic future.
These ideas are still with us today. We see scientists declaring that women are evolutionarily superior to men, naturally smarter and healthier, and this explains their longer lives and better performance at schools and universities. The future, we are told, is female.
The histories of eugenics and feminism are deeply intertwined. Indeed, eugenics survived after the Holocaust by evolving from a movement of top-down state-imposed sterilizations into a movement based on women’s right to birth control and abortions. By pivoting from a coercive state policy to a campaign for women’s rights, the eugenics movement achieved its aims of slower population growth, fewer unwanted births and fewer births with hereditary illnesses like Down Syndrome. Some economists even argue the crime rate fell thanks to the legalization of abortion.
Eugenics survived, mutated and went mainstream because of feminism. But there was an unintended consequence — the free availability of abortions led to millions of female embryos being aborted in Asian countries.
Further reading:
Victoria Woodhull, Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and Writings of Victoria Goodhull
Frances Swiney, The Awakening of Women, or Women’s Part in Evolution
Annie Besant, ‘The Coming Race’
Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, Man: Whence, How and Whither
Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race
George Robb: Eugenics, Spirituality and Sex Differentiation in Edwardian Britain: The Case of Frances Swiney
Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England
Lucy Delap, ‘The Superwoman: Theories of Gender and Genius in Edwardian Britain’
Jessica Albrecht, ‘’Religion, Feminism and Esotericism’
Jessica Albrecht, ‘In Search of Superwomen: feminist eugenicists’
Susan Klausford and Alison Bashford, ‘Fertility Control: Eugenics, Neo-Malthusianism and Feminism’