The (Dis)Ability of the “New Woman”: Medicine, Eugenics, and Women’s Rights in the Progressive Era

This paper examines how physicians’ definitions of disability collided in unexpected ways with the emerging sciences of hereditary and eugenic theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this period, the state and the legal apparatus of the courts regulated “unfit” people through the passage of sterilization, involuntary commitment, and marital fitness laws. These laws were part of the larger Progressive program of medical hygiene which sought to control degeneracy, deviance, aberrant sexuality, laziness, or other vices. Women were often disproportionately targeted by these laws, and confined to institutions or sterilized at higher rates than men. But in this same moment, women reformers began employing the rhetoric of eugenics and disability in a different way, using the latest scientific and medical understandings of “fitness” to promote improvements in marriage law. They advocated sexual choice and birth control as methods for women to reclaim control over their bodies and improve the health of the “race.” This reframing of women’s rights through a lens of eugenic science created a new political persona for women – one in where science “proved” women were capable political actors, precisely because of their sexual difference.  These discourses changed the conversation about women’s rights during a moment when the drive for suffrage was taking center stage. Rather than continuing to encourage women to free themselves through legal reform, it directed them to look outside of it for solutions. This strategy suggested that women’s problems and needs had advanced beyond what the law could do for them. Reformers grappled with why and how the “New Woman” was evolutionarily and hereditarily beyond the current legal and social system. These changes would have a profound impact on the direction of the early birth control movement in the twentieth century.