The power and politics of fetal imagery

"The highest in each class was a twilight baby": scientific motherhood, twilight sleep and the eugenics movement in McClure's Magazine

In the early twentieth century, childbirth was increasingly being viewed as a medical experience in North America. Women were encouraged to engage with 'scientific motherhood' by adhering to medical advice and undergoing the latest medical and technological interventions. Two movements simultaneously emerged that engaged with scientific motherhood: the positive eugenics movement, which sought to encourage reproduction among specific groups, and the twilight sleep movement, which promoted the use of pain management during childbirth. While these two distinct movements had different goals, they intersected both in their intended audiences (white, middle-class and upper-class American women) and in their prioritisation of medical and scientific authority. This article builds on work that has identified connections between twilight sleep and the eugenics movement to consider the role of twentieth-century magazines in rhetorically linking the eugenics and twilight sleep movements, and how this contributed to constructing the cultural role of the 'scientific mother'.As a key proponent of twilight sleep, the American monthly periodical McClure's Magazine is the focus of this investigation. Articles published in McClure's incorporated the rhetoric of the eugenics movement to promote twilight sleep and 'painless childbirth', while also engaging with concerns of the eugenics movement by framing the falling birthrate among American women as a social and political problem. Alongside the rhetorical framing within McClure's articles, we focus on visual material such as photographs that exhibit 'eugenic mothers' and healthy 'twilight sleep babies' to promote the method's safety and efficacy to American audiences. This article incorporates scholarship on early twentieth-century eugenics and photography, women's involvement in the eugenics movement, and twilight sleep and the politics of women's health. Through its analysis, this article demonstrates that the convergence of developments in obstetrics and the eugenics movement in popular media had complex implications for women's reproductive agency in the early twentieth century.