248 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 7 illus., notes, bibl., index Gender and
American Culture Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in
the United States, 1890-1938 Through nostalgic idealizations of
motherhood, family, and the home, influential leaders in early
twentieth-century America constructed and legitimated a range of
reforms that promoted human reproduction. Their pronatalism
emerged from a modernist conviction that reproduction and
population could be regulated. European countries sought to
regulate or encourage reproduction through legislation; America,
by contrast, fostered ideological and cultural ideas of
pronatalism through what Laura Lovett calls “nostalgic
modernism,” which romanticized agrarianism and promoted
scientific racism and eugenics. Lovett looks closely at the
ideologies of five influential American figures: Mary Lease's
maternalist agenda, Florence Sherbon's eugenic “fitter families”
campaign, George Maxwell's “homecroft” movement of land
reclamation and home building, Theodore Roosevelt's c