Abstract
Though the middle classes and ruling elite had long been uneasy about the future of South Africa, the Great Depression sparked fears that the country had begun to decline because of the rapidly deteriorating health of the population. Within the social movement that emerged in 1930 to offer birth control as a solution to the national crisis, social reformers clustered into two discernible groups that reflected distinct ideologies. One group was made up of women who believed that poverty posed the greatest danger to the nation because of its devastating impact on the family, examined in the next chapter. This chapter analyzes the second group, the eugenists that were convinced that the primary threat to the social order was “racial” in nature. Eugenists argued that “white civilization” was in jeopardy, which was threatening the viability of the young nation. Certainly the line dividing the two approaches was often blurred, as maternalists evinced complacency regarding South Africa’s unequal racial order and some eugenists were genuinely attempting to eliminate poverty and suffering among whites. Nevertheless, they were sufficiently different ideologically to have markedly different degrees of success as providers of contraceptive services on the one hand and, on the other hand, as lobbyists of the state.
In South Africa, large families, often 10 to 12 and even 20 children, occur among the poor whites. It is the slum-dwellers, the feeble in will, the careless, the shiftless and indifferent who have the large families and, consequently, in the future, a larger proportion of the population will have the hereditary characteristics of these classes … In South Africa there must be limitation of the “poor white” element.
Herbert Fantham, President of the Race Welfare Society, 19301
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
H.B. Fantham, ‘Eugenics’ Child Welfare, 9, 7 (1930), p. 5.
N. Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 10.
The historiography on eugenics is massive and growing. Major studies include F. Dikötter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” American Historical Review, 103, 2 (1998), pp. 467–78;
F. Dikötter, Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); N. Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”;
W. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
M. Adams (ed), The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);
R. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1990);
D. Kevles, In the Name of the Race: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985);
A. McLaren, Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885–1945 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Inc., 1990);
S.J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, revised edn (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996);
G. Jones, Social Hygiene in 20th Century Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
C. Webster, “Introduction,” in C. Webster, (ed.), Biology, Medicine and Society 1840–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 1–13.
S. Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
S. Klausen, “‘For the Sake of the Race’: Eugenic Discourses of Feeblemindedness and Motherhood in the South African Medical Record, 1903–26,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 10, 1 (1997), pp. 27–50.
P.W. Laidler, “The Practice of Eugenics,” South African Medical Journal, 8 (1934), p. 823.
M. Malan, The Quest for Health: The South African Institute for Medical Research (Johannesburg: Lowry Publishers, 1988), pp. 35, 37.
A. Porter, “Eugenics from a Woman’s Point of View,” Child Welfare, 10, 2 (1931), p. 4.
G. Jones, “Eugenics and Social Policy Between the Wars,” The Historical Journal, 25, 3 (1982), p. 722.
Hardy was a partner in the accounting firm Howard Pirn and Hardy. Pirn was among the first theorists of segregation to outline a plan for a reserve system for Africans, but by 1930 he was a prominent liberal critic of segregation. See S. Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–36 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 23–25.
E. Brink, “The Afrikaner Women of the Garment Worker’s Union, 1918–1938,” (MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1986), p. 45.
S. Parnell, “Slums, Segregation and Poor Whites in Johannesburg, 1920–1934,” in Robert Morrell, ed. White But Poor: Essays on the History of the Poor Whites in Southern Africa, 1880–1940 (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1992), p. 22.
D.O. Meara, Volkskapitalisme: Class, Capital and Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism 1934–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 32.
Cited in D. Gaitskell, “Getting Close to the Hearts of Mothers:” Medical Missionaries Among African Women and Children in Johannesburg Between the Wars,” in V. Fildes, L. Marks, and H. Marland (eds), Women and Children First: International Maternal and Infant Welfare 1870–1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 186.
E. Koch, “Doornfontein and its African Working Class, 1914–1935; A Study of Popular Culture in Johannesburg” (MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1983), p. 188.
E. Roux, Time Longer Than Rope: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), p. 272.
A. Proctor, “Class Struggle, Segregation and the City: A History of Sophiatown, 1905–40,” in Belinda Bozzoli (ed.), Labour, Townships and Protest: Studies in the Social History of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1979), p. 65.
J. Hyslop, “White Working-Class Women and the Invention of Apartheid: “Purified” Afrikaner Nationalist Agitation for Legislation Against “Mixed” Marriages, 1934–9,” Journal of African History, 36 (1995), p. 62.
E.G.Malherbe, Never A Dull Moment (Cape Town: Timmins Pub., 1981), pp. 130–1.
H. Houghton, “Economic Development, 1865–1965,” in M. Wilson and L. Thompson (eds), Oxford History of South Africa, vol. 2, p. 28.
Cited in N. Roos, From Workplace to War: Class, Race and Gender Amongst White Volunteers, 1939–1953 (PhD thesis, University of North West, 2001), p. 91.
P. Rich, White Power and the Liberal Conscience: Racial Segregation and South African Liberalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
E. Hellman, Rooiyard: A Sociological Study of an Urban Native Slumyard (London: Oxford University Press, 1948). The study was published a whole fourteen years after its completion.
D. Gaitskell, “Housewives, Maids or Mothers: Some Contradictions of Domesticity for Christian Women in Johannesburg, 1903–39,” Journal of African History, 24 (1983), p. 250; and Gaitskell, “Getting Close to the Hearts of Mothers,” p. 199.
R.F.A. Hoernle, Wits University Group Test of Mental Ability, 1925 (Pretoria: Transvaal Education Department, 1926); “Intelligence Tests,” Star, August 2, 111. S. Marks, Divided Sisterhood: Race, Class and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession (London: Macmillan Press, 1994), p. 11.
Cited in C. Burns, “Reproductive Labours: The Politics of Women’s Health in South Africa, 1900 to 1960” (PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 1995), p. 219.
L. Marchand, “Obstetrics Amongst South African Natives,” South African Medical tournai, 7 (1932), p. 329.
C.R. McCann, Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 163.
S. Dubow, “Scientism, Social Research and the Limits of “South Africanism”: The Case of Ernst Gideon Malherbe,” South African Historical Journal, 44 (2001), pp. 99–142.
C. Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 5.
Ibid., p. 4. See also C. Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), in particular the introduction,
and S. Mcllwaine, The Southern Poor-White from Lubberland to Tobacco Road (Norman, Ok: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939).
J. Smuts, “South African’s Human Material,” in Report of the National Conference on Social Work (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1936), p. 10.
Copyright information
© 2004 Susanne M. Klausen
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Klausen, S.M. (2004). Birth Control and the Poor White Problem. In: Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910–39. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230511255_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230511255_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-51722-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-51125-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)