I'm lifting extensively from this article on one Frances Swiney (of whom I'd never heard before stumbling across this minor goldmine of delusionary thinking) because it combines several of my recently favorite themes: eugenics, Theosophy, Anglo-Aryan racial hubris, and all-purpose dumbass pig pucky. Let's get started then, shall we?

Eugenic ideas and language were... widely employed by English feminists to buttress their arguments for an ideology of liberation. Some feminists used eugenic language to construct an ingenious argument that women actually represented a higher stage of evolutionary development than men, and were thus eugenically more "fit." This "fitness" or superiority in turn would call upon women to regenerate society.

Seeing as Frances was born in 1847, we can see today how well this program has worked. To be fair, however, this shortfall is perhaps due to repressive laws prohibiting wholesale castration. Even from beyond the grave, I feel Swiney's pain.

No one made this case more emphatically or persuasively than British feminist, social purity activist, and Theosophist, Frances Swiney... a founding member of the Eugenics Society in 1907... Swiney argued for the biological superiority of women -- a theme she was to develop over the next twenty years in a series of books and articles that combined science with Theosophical mysticism. In her characteristically florid style, Swiney proclaimed that "science has ... abundantly proved that in the mysterious evolution of sex, the male element was first non-existent; and on its initial appearance was primarily an excrescence, a superfluity, a waste product of Nature, discarded or expelled by the female..."

"An excrescence, a superfluity, a waste product" -- hmmm, that pretty much describes how I feel this morning. I'd go looking for a grafik, except I don't think even Google Images would have a (fitting) representation of an excresence. So, pressing onward...

Swiney... cited physician Ludwig Buchner, that given women's smaller body size, they actually had larger brains than men.

Come again?

She quoted Havelock Ellis who posited that women's more delicate and hairless bodies represented a higher evolution than the more simian male...

I'd be tempted to say something here about Giant Hairy Bloggers, were that not a post best forgotten.

As further proving a higher stage of organic development, Swiney culled evidence from medical journals that suggested "fewer female monstrosities are born than male ... idiocy is everywhere more frequent in males than in females" and "men are also more liable to insanity than women."

You know, rhetoric like that drives me insane! So I guess she maybe had a point. The male corner on monstrous idiocy, however, I might debate.

In general, Swiney emphasized that men retained more animal-like characteristics, such as a keener sense of smell, while women possessed "superhuman," or psychic powers... Once more, women were leading the race, this time in the development of a sixth sense.

I smell dead people.

Speaking of whom, I'll spare you most of the stuff about Nietzsche that follows. Academic articles always have stuff about Nietzsche, but it's not usually too important. And neither are they. But they can be fun, no?

English feminist Catherine Gasquoine Hartley was also influenced by Nietzsche, and in works such as The Truth about Women and Women's Wild Oats she argued that women would regenerate the race because they were closer to NATURE, more instinctual than men, and thus better able to escape the stifling confines of a false civilization.

Emphasis mine. As if you couldn't guess.

But wait. Here comes the really good part!

For Hartley, women were "guardians of the Race-body and Race-soul" under whose tutelage "the universal creative energy, no longer finding gratification alone in personal ends, shall at last reach its goal and give birth to a race of new women and new men." ...

The physical culture movement of the early twentieth century tapped into women's Ubermensch fantasies. This is especially apparent in the activities and rhetoric of the Women's League of Health and Beauty, an interwar organization which combined calisthenics and gymnastic pageantry under the inspirational leadership of Mary Bagot Stack. Stack's daughter, PRUNELLA...

Emphasis... oh, never mind.

...was even presented in League literature as a kind of supergirl, the harbinger of the more advanced women of the future...

Yeah sure, Prunella the Supergirl. I get it.

I think.

But actually, this is the really good part.

English women's superiority was not only measured against men, but also against the "uncivilized" and "degraded" women of Africa and Asia. According to Swiney, "the Anglo-Saxon woman leads the van." English women were the most exalted of their high-ranking sex and would be the first to manifest "stupendous change in the reproduction of mankind." European women had already brought the West to its commanding position in the world, Swiney contended in Woman and Natural Law: "For let us reflect for a moment what woman has done already for humanity-in-the-making. Place a native Australian beside a Greek statue, when Greece was at her apotheosis of physical and intellectual achievement, and realise by a practical illustration what the mothers of the race have accomplished in anatomical structure alone. Compare a Madonna of the Italian school at its zenith with a negress of the African coast, and it will be gauged somewhat how stupendous has been the task of the mothers of mankind." In Swiney's formulation, Australians and Africans are not part of humanity, but lesser creatures whose degradation naturally highlights the superiority of white women. This view was typical of nineteenth-century feminism, which, by stressing the inferiority of colonial women, justified Western women's mission to uplift and comfort their oppressed sisters.

The White Woman's Burden, I guess you could say. But here I need to jump over a bunch of wordy verbiage to get to the really really good part. (What can I say? This thing just kept getting better and better.)

The growing popularity of spiritualism and what today would be called "new age" philosophies among middle- and upper-class English women at the turn of the century was in part a response to the "biology is destiny" arguments of science. Recent scholarship demonstrates that occultism attracted many feminists because it emphasized that women were more spiritual than men and were destined to lead men upward, away from the physical and the sexual.

Oh yeah, baby, lead me upward! Oh White Madonna Goddess, please! Gimme some-a that Old Time Occultism and save me from my inner-African male malevolence. Oooga-booga.

Amen.

from: Eugenics, Spirituality, And Sex Differentiation In Edwardian England: The Case of Frances Swiney by George Robb
source: Journal of Women's History, 22 September 1998
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 1998 Indiana University Press