"When the vicious and feeble-minded people reproduce, they do so more recklessly."
Mary Stopes, 1918
Wise Parenthood: A Practical Sequel to Married Love
quoted in Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century, p. 58
...in Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics (1909), Caleb William Saleeby crystallized the position which social purists had come increasingly to adopt: "we have in marriage not only the greatest instrument of raceculture that has yet been employed -- half-consciously -- by man, but also an instrument supremely fitted, and indeed without a rival, for the conscious, deliberate, and scientific intentions of modern eugenicists."
from Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century, p. 71
Oxford University Press Book Description
- A
wide-ranging exploration of how the eugenic debate obsessed fiction
writers and social reformers alike, in late Victorian England
- Strong
supporters included [George Bernard] Shaw, [H.G.] Wells, Herbert Spencer, Marie Stopes, and
Virginia Woolf; among fierce opponents were Thomas Huxley, Mona Caird,
Chesterton, and Belloc
- A radical contribution to English studies, nineteenth-century and gender studies,
and the history of science
the quote below is from: Recent studies in the nineteenth century
by Kate Flint
source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 22 September 2004
via: 
HighBeam™ Research
Copyright © 2004 Rice University
Familial relations of a very different kind form the subject matter of Angelique Richardson's Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman, which considers the ideas concerning human selective breeding that were in circulation at the end of the nineteenth century. Developed by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton in the 1860s, and drawing on theories of evolution, eugenics looked to provide solutions both for the problems of the urban poor and for the challenge of maintaining national supremacy. Richardson shows how these theories had particular resonance for a number of intellectually and politically concerned women in the period, who firmly believed that "the women of Britain could best serve the race, the country, and their own interests through the rational selection of a reproductive partner" (p. 215). This was the view that time and again comes across in the fiction of some of the best known New Woman authors, particularly Sarah Grand and George Egerton (although, as she shows, resistance to eugenics is an important aspect of Mona Caird's work). Richardson's achievement is to get us to recognize this fact and its implications, as well as the part played by their writings in the late-century debates between the hereditarians and the environmentalists. This is a bravely revisionist reading, which will give considerable pause for thought to all those who have enthusiastically embraced and celebrated the progressive, protofeminist aspects of the New Woman movement. One understands freshly that the resistance to romance which can be found in so many of the New Woman novelists and polemicists is less a defiant call for woman's autonomy and self-determination than a demand for rational reproduction. Richardson exposes not just the class biases, but in some cases the antihumanitarianism of these writers.
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