Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and Writings of Victoria Woodhull

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Inkling Books, 2005 - History - 331 pages
Francis Galton is said to have founded eugenics with an 1864 magazine article. But a single article does not make a movement and Galton, by his own admission, did little to promote the idea before 1901. This book demonstrates that eugenists have given us an inaccurate history of their movement, assigning credit to Galton, the eminent half-cousin of Charles Darwin, when the real credit belongs to a woman who was perhaps the most radical nineteenth-century American feminist.That woman was Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for U.S. President and, with her sister, the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street. This book contains all her major speeches and writings on eugenics, showing that she was the first of either sex to take to the road and, in hundreds of speeches across the U.S., champion the idea of creating a perfected humanity by breeding perfect children. She even beat Galton in his own land, moving to England in 1876 and introducing eugenics there.Woodhull was not a shy about her role. The title for this book comes from the headline of a 1912 London newspaper article proclaiming her Lady Eugenist. In 1927, shortly before she died, the New York Times would carry an article in which she praised eugenic sterilization and claimed to have advocated that fifty years ago in my book Marriage of the Unfit.

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Page 115 - And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end: I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.
Page 65 - And the name of the second river is Gi-hon, the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hid-deKel that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.
Page 84 - For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.
Page 115 - Having the glory of God : and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal...
Page 117 - Then saith he unto me, See thou do it not : for I am thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book : worship God.
Page 22 - Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.
Page 148 - Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception : in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children : and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
Page 86 - And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
Page 149 - Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For, behold, the days are coming, in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.
Page 116 - And I saw no temple therein : for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it : for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it : and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it.

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