Angus McLaren has made a significant contribution to the history of sexuality over the last thirty-five years, particularly the history of reproductive health (abortion, contraception, and infertility). His beautifully readable and engaging writing style has made his work invaluable to those of us teaching these topics at the undergraduate level. He also tends to work in a geographically comparative fashion, moving quite effortlessly between the contexts of North America and Western Europe. His comparative approach remains unusual within the historiography of sexuality and adds further value to anything he writes.
Reproduction by Design is another illuminating and entertaining read. Its central argument is that in the earlier twentieth-century the reproductive body was the focus of significant cultural and political contention, and a key site in debates over the complex and troubling relationship between humans, machines and the environment. While this time around, McLaren appears from the title to offer a rather more circumscribed study – focusing purely on interwar Britain – there is in fact much comparative material to be found once you dive between the covers. It is also timely in its ‘medical humanities’ approach, relying heavily on novels, plays, films, and science fiction from the 1920s and 1930s. However, part of McLaren’s argument is that ‘science fiction’ was created not simply by novelists and playwrights, but by eugenicists, birth controllers, demographers and doctors. Indeed, anyone talking about the future of sex and reproduction was effectively producing ‘science fiction’.
The book advances on the uncontroversial basis that most depictions of the‘future’ in scientific theories and popular culture were in fact crystallisations of current social concerns, rather than predictive of future trends. Interwar fears over ‘modernity’ thus stemmed in large part from the social upheaval that accompanied the First World War, with its sacrifice of individual freedom to the admirable but deadly emerging forms of technology. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is simply the best known of the many writers of his generation who were debating the impact of the encroachment of science and industry on humanity: the road to unparalleled progress, or to death and destruction?
As the boundaries between human and machine, natural and artificial, appeared to be collapsing, McLaren argues convincingly that reproduction became a particular battleground for those anxiously debating the merits of modernity. Many of those writing about the relationship between capitalism, mass society, urbanisation and technology – most famously, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and H.G. Wells, but many lesser known authors besides – were also debating the future evolution of sexual and family relations, and a perceived crisis in reproduction. Modern, mechanised society was increasingly being held responsible for producing both shoddy products and unfit families. The robot represented both the docile worker on which modern industry depended, and the unthinking drone whose uncontrolled reproduction posed a serious threat to social stability. Eugenic concerns implicitly or explicitly framed most accounts of the future of sex, gender, and reproduction: eugenics was either their best hope of countering the population problems which the forces of modernity had created or the worst example of the age’s penchant for technological fixes.
In Reproduction by Design, McLaren has produced a highly readable account of the complex relationship between technology, ecology and sexuality, and the reproductive dilemmas that accompanied modernity. Those interested in the modern history of science, reproductive technology and sexuality should find it a rewarding read.
