How White Feminism Went Full Eugenics in India
Revered in the U.S., Margaret Sanger and Katherine Mayo were also the loudest to promote the “too many Indians” trope that persists today.
“India stands today at that point of social development where population is controlled by disease, and disease only,” Katherine Mayo, an American nativist and feminist, wrote in the extremely controversial Mother India (1927). According to her, India’s growing population had to be controlled. After all, “freedom from wars and disorders and from killing famines” had led to a “sheer volume of humanity piling up.” India’s population boom was a crisis, she argued, one only the West could solve.
In America, birth control seems like the most feminist notion ever, one championing female autonomy and reproductive choice. Women don’t have to give birth unless they want to. But in India, birth control was a mechanism of control. It was how two American feminists — almost exactly 100 years ago — sought to restrict Asian reproduction. They believed Asians didn’t deserve to reproduce at all.