Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)

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Hungry Realism: Style and Subjecthood in Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl / Amy Gentry

 

<1> Meridel Le Sueur's 1939 novel The Girl occupies a troubled place within the history of American genres. Situated within several different subgenres—at once proletarian literature, feminist complaint, and sentimental melodrama—the novel sits comfortably in none. Written in 1939 but only published in 1978, it entered the public sphere almost forty years out of context, in a moment of radical feminism which, while it often resonated with Le Sueur's politics, could not but offer important dissonances as well. This long silence and late revision have partially obscured the book's original depiction of hunger as a force that destabilizes subjectivity within the novel and, by extension, destabilizes the novel's generic status. By transforming all desires into the desire for food, Le Sueur's powerful depiction of hunger appropriates the stylistic techniques of modernism in order to realistically render a hungry subject haunted by the shadow of Depression-era eugenics discourse. Le Sueur's refusal to subordinate the body's needs to those of the speaking subject, even and especially in cases of political expediency, complicates her characters' entry into the Habermasian public sphere. However, by insisting on the capacity of hunger as a kind of political speech, Le Sueur avoids earning a place for working-class women in the public sphere at the price of their disembodiment. In the process, she resists a line of eugenics discourse that lent biopolitical ballast to early socialist and feminist movements.

<2> The Girl tells the story of a nameless girl from rural Minnesota who works in a bar in St. Paul. Clara, a fellow waitress working as a prostitute on the side, takes the girl under her wing as she learns the rudimentaries of love and sex, but also of rape, prostitution, abortion, and domestic violence. Along with the bar-owner Belle and the labor organizer Amelia, Clara and the girl watch their unemployed men self-destruct one by one under the grinding conditions of the Depression. Impregnated by her lover Butch, the girl secretly defies his demand that she get an abortion, hoping that the money from a bank robbery will enable them to get married. However, Butch and three other men are shot and killed during the crime, and the girl, dependent on state assistance during her pregnancy, is forced into a relief maternity home where sterilization after delivery is routine. Amelia rescues the girl before she has her baby, but fails to save Clara from state-mandated electric shock treatments that shatter her health and her sanity. The novel ends with the climactic conjunction of three dramatic events: a mass demonstration demanding "Milk and Iron Pills for Clara," Clara's death scene, and the birth of the girl's baby. The novel closes as an intergenerational community of women vow to "let our voice be heard in the whole city" (130). [1]

<3> Produced as part of the proletarian literary movement among American communists in the thirties, The Girl suffered initially from its association with a politically unpopular genre. Throughout the late 1930s, proletarian literature came under fire from within the CPUSA as well as from outsiders. [2] By the time Le Sueur had completed The Girl in 1939, Philip Rahv had announced the death of proletarian literature in the pages of the Southern Review. A former party member and co-founder of the Partisan Review in 1933, now disillusioned by Stalinism and the Popular Front, Rahv depicted proletarian literature as a false genre, "the literature of a party disguised as the literature of a class" (14). According to Rahv, a true class-based literature "accumulates organic traditions and norms" through "a free exchange and conflict of feelings and ideas" (12). [3] The language of "free exchange and conflict" hints at the normative capitalism that invisibly structures Rahv's concept of genre. If, as Pierre Bourdieu argues in The Field of Cultural Production, genre fiction conforms to market-influenced formal codes at the expense of its artistic autonomy, [4] then Rahv's accusation makes a structural substitution of the state for the market. Thus proletarian literature, as Barbara Foley and Alan Wald have argued, reversed the normative (and lucrative) market-structure of genre fiction without garnering the cultural capital associated with the avant-garde. [5] In other words, the radical proletarian artist suffered all the stigma of the genre artist without the compensatory cash flow.

<4> However, Le Sueur's style interfered with her ability to produce even a generic form of proletarian literature, producing a second degree of stigma from within the party itself. In a 1985 interview with Constance Coiner, Le Sueur spoke of the disapproval her writing provoked from party members: "I fought them. I kept my lyrical style. Sometimes I was almost blacklisted by the Left, [which] often commented on my lyrical style. They wanted . . . socialist realism" (96). [6] Many scholars of the Left have described the process by which socialist realism came to represent party doctrine as well as Le Sueur's deviation from its norms of both form and content. [7] However, if Le Sueur's writing proved too lyrical for the Marxist orthodoxy, its political telos kept it from conforming to a modernist orthodoxy that insisted on the autonomy of art. Rather than seeing Le Sueur as caught between an orthodox realism and an experimental modernism—after all, by 1939 modernism was no longer new—it is helpful to follow Julian Markels, who, flipping the stylistic chronology, places her work "between a 'traditional' modernism and an 'organic' new realism" (87). [8] I suggest that Le Sueur in fact deterritorializes modernism itself, appropriating its formal modes of representation in order to realistically depict a subjectivity shaped unapologetically by the needs of the body. [9]

<5> A third degree of stigma afflicting The Girl involves its association with women's fiction, which, even and especially within radical party politics, debased it still further. Paula Rabinowitz argues that "[w]omen's revolutionary narratives of the 1930s have, by and large, been ignored by the Marxist critics of the period for remaining too feminist" (7). [10] While Rabinowitz places this lacuna within contemporary Marxist criticism, she finds its lineage in Lenin's displeasure with women who were "more concerned with arguing about sex and personal relationships than with learning about economic theory" (119). The affective and embodied structures of women's interactions with the daily conditions of their oppression were submerged under the rubric of class. When expressed, such structures elicited the party's disapproval for being either too personal (and therefore irrelevant) or simply too bleak. Thus Le Sueur's essay "Women on the Breadlines," which depicts the crushing poverty endured by women during the Depression, was criticized by the editors of New Masses for not showing revolutionary potential. [11] The subordination of gender to class became, in Rabinowitz's words, "the invisible scar within the scar" (20).

<6> This makes the fourth and most recent critique of Le Sueur, a feminist critique of its heterosexual and maternalist stance, seem in some ways even more tragic. This line of critique began with Adrienne Rich in 1980, just two years after the novel's first publication by the West End Press. In "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Rich cited Le Sueur at length in order to call attention to the competition between the novel's depictions of mutually sustaining female relationships and the "heterosexual compulsion" of its love plot. For Rich, The Girl contains promising scenes of "woman identification," but ultimately illustrates "the diffusion and frustration of female bonding that might, in a more conscious form, reintegrate love and power" (34). [12] The specificity of Rich's project notwithstanding, other critics working in a feminist-historicist vein have in one way or another reproduced this critique. In one of the most sensitive such readings of the novel, Paula Rabinowitz claims that Le Sueur "construct[s] a narrative of female desire in which maternal power is processed through heterosexuality." The essentializing tendency of this move, which revalues feminine labor as proletarian history, is to "invok[e] women's biological capacity to bear children without interrogating the cultural platitudes surrounding motherhood" (123). Amelia's twin roles of communist and midwive emphasize this equivalence of the two meanings of "labor". While it conveys a powerful message of communalism through feminist solidarity, for Rabinowitz, the novel "cannot challenge either the gender or the genre conventions of the proletarian plot" (124). Observing that the women at the book's climactic finish "do not sing labor songs but rather chant in praise of femininity," Rabinowitz gives a typical disapproving gloss on the book's movement from communism to an inadequate, essentializing feminism (116).

<7> Thus Le Sueur's novel has in some sense, and according to some critics, failed at every stage of its life as a radical piece of literature. It is worth asking what makes a work that imagines itself as politically empowering so incredibly resistant to the radical movements that should logically embrace it. I argue that it is the work's style, or rather the style's work, to move from faultline to faultline in this way, creating a subject who resists every affiliation threatening the primacy of the body. By insisting on the dominance of hunger over all other kinds of experience, Le Sueur creates a hungry subject who is by societal definition incapable of entering the Habermasian public sphere as proletarian or feminist, and for whom motherhood offers the only approximation of an adequate response to hunger. As Nancy Fraser and others have pointed out, Habermasian public sphere theory privileges the disembodied written public sphere over one that would necessitate co-presence. Fraser argues that the idea of "bracketing inequalities of status" (63) in the Habermasian public sphere necessarily reinscribes those inequalities of status. [13] Nowhere is this argument more persuasive than in the realm of disembodied print culture, where the body's absence allows voices to be heard as if unattached to wants and needs that may seem too particular. However, in refusing to write women's bodies out of her work, Le Sueur creates a kind of circulating text whose bodily traces threaten to impede its acceptance in the public sphere – as the book's troubled reception history suggests.

<8> Crafted in the context of large-scale economic disaster, the narrative of The Girl is driven by hunger. Erin Obermueller has noted that Le Sueur "articulates subject formation through the experiences of the body (birth, death, sex, hunger, and labor)" (47). [14] While I fundamentally agree with this assessment, I argue that The Girl's narrative organizes and articulates all of these experiences of the body through hunger, an elemental force in the novel that merges the raw physical need for food with the subjective instability caused by such a need. In composing The Girl, Le Sueur drew extensively on her Depression-era reportage for plot and characterization. Two earlier essays, "Women On the Breadlines" (1932) and "Women Are Hungry" (1934), simultaneously acknowledge the desires of women for sex and companionship and illustrate her belief that, nevertheless, "there is principally one kind of hunger, the hunger for bread" ("Women on the Breadlines," 156). [15] These essays work in concert with the novel to render food the primary object of a desire that governs, regulates, and subsumes other types of desire.

<9> Food, or more commonly its lack, makes an appearance on almost every page of the novel as characters ceaselessly discuss what they want to eat, what they plan to eat, and what other people are eating or not eating. The most casual survey of the book's use of slang confirms that all the characters speak compulsively in food metaphors: "you need butter on your bread and cream in your coffee" (3); "Hoink knows which side his bread is buttered" (16); "When you're in love you need sugar and spice and everything nice" (48), etc. These banal repetitions gain poignancy when characters present their class predicament in terms of cannibalism, expressing the suspicion that not eating is analogous to getting eaten. Thus Ack complains, "Those big guys they eat the little guys like us" (16), and the girl says that she and her kind "are being eaten by some rot" (72). Clara's death, easily preventable if only she had been able to acquire milk and iron pills, provokes the ringing accusation, "Who doesn't care that we are hungry?" (130).

<10> This pervasive hunger structures the first-person narrator's consciousness, creating a style that appropriates the formal features of high modernism to show the profoundly destabilizing effects of hunger on the subject. The use of stream-of-consciousness, the typographic idiosyncracies (there are no quotation marks used to indicate speech), and the lyrical, sing-song repetitiveness of the syntax all reflect the influence of modernist techniques. [16] The hunger for food, rather than standard narrative chronology, provides the spatial and temporal logic of the novel. Each setting in the novel is associated with a meal either eaten, longed for, or lovingly remembered — Booya on Sundays in the German Village; fresh mutton long ago on the family homestead; the promise of coffee and doughnuts in the park at Christmas. Like Butch's crazy mother, who "remembers food she ate fifty years ago" (105) and constantly speaks of feeding Butch even after his death, the novel fetishizes meal as memory, creating a vertiginous chronology that borders on the pathological.

<11> The reportage provides a detailed account of this pathological aspect of hunger. In "Women on the Breadlines" and "Women Are Hungry," hunger emerges as an epidemic that threatens agency by undermining a woman's capacity to separate her mental process from the unmet demands of her body. Le Sueur captures, in these pieces, the effects of hunger on decision-making and behavior:

If you've never been without money, or food, something very strange happens when you get a bit of money, a kind of madness. . . . A lust takes hold of you. You see food in the windows. In imagination you eat hugely; you taste a thousand meals. You look in windows. Colors are brighter; you buy something to dress up in. An excitement takes hold of you. You know it is suicide but you can't help it. You must have food, dainty, splendid food, and a bright hat so once again you feel blithe, rid of that ratty gnawing shame (140). [17]

Shame is rendered here as the return to physical sensation, a "gnawing" that eats away at the failed psychological subject who, unable to control her body, feels herself rapidly losing her mind. The conflation of food with new clothes does not trivialize hunger; rather, it shows how hunger contaminates and colonizes other desires, investing them with an urgency that feels like "a kind of madness."

<12> Even the sex drive, always the primary one in psychological accounts, is contaminated by hunger: the girl describes her sexual desire as "a terrible root [that] went in the dark with a hundred mouths looking for food" (53). Unaccustomed or unable to process her sexual desire for Butch, the girl borrows words from her more solid desire for food. Thus, in the diner, she reads unattainable affective states into the unattainable menu items: "I read all the sandwich signs, american cheese, chickenhamporkcoffemilk-buttermilklettucetomato hotbeef. . . . They looked like signs like lovehatejealousy-marriage" (43). After her first experience of sexual intercourse with Butch, the girl's desire even gains a bizarre sort of body with agency and a voice: "Some beings, more like hunger, had given me something from their bodies, had come over me, said something" [my italics] (45). In this complicated image the girl's subjectivity undergoes a blurring, so that it becomes impossible to sort out who or what is the desiring subject. Interiority is rendered as pure hunger, with no indication of who hungers or what they crave. As an effect of all this blurring, desires for warmth, companionship, domestic stability, and food come to feel like many names for the same hunger: "Sure. I got hungers. I want the earth. . . . I want meat, bread, children. I am starving. I am sitting here starving" (43). Here, as when the girl insists "it's not a fault aching for a child, food, love" (70), the three objects of aching merge into a list of appositive equivalencies. These equivalencies are beautifully literalized in the dream that visits the girl as she decides whether to terminate her pregnancy: "I thought I would have the child . . . and I dreamed I was looking through a little hole like those candy eggs we used to have, where you saw lambs grazing and a little house and children playing in the sugar" (71). The sugary tableau is associated with birth by way of eggs and lambs, but also with the ghastly "spoonful of turpentine with sugar" (11) that Belle takes to induce abortions. Recalling the scene from "Women On the Breadlines" of a hungry woman peering into shop windows, the girl's dream paints an image of domestic bliss as bright, colorful, and above all, edible.

<13> If in the second half of the book this polymorphous hunger becomes focalized around the girl's pregnancy, it is specious to claim, as Laura Hapke does, that "Neither in life nor in art did [Le Sueur] seem concerned with the perils of the maternal" (89). [18] In fact, it is precisely around the issue of maternity that the book's doubled existence as 1939 manuscript and 1978 publication becomes a factor in its critical reception. Constance Coiner has pointed out that The Girl acquired much of its seemingly unqualified glorification of motherhood during its revision in 1976-77. While every recent critic dutifully points out that the original manuscript did not contain the "cultural feminist ending" wherein the protagonist gives birth to a girl next to her dying friend Clara surrounded by humming women (Rabinowitz, n197), this acknowledgement has rarely deterred criticisms of the scene as bio-essentialist or simply cloying. [19] However, reading the book past its later revisions and back into its original context, we may discover a hunger for motherhood predicated on something other than a feminism of difference: the threat of sterilization.

<14> The theme of sterilization at the hands of the government haunts The Girl and Le Sueur's other writing from the thirties. This fear was well-founded. In the 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling, the United States Supreme Court upheld states' rights to practice involuntary eugenic sterilization on "mental defectives." [20] Minnesota had passed its own version of these laws as early as 1925. Moreover, after 1928 sterilization was increasingly and disproportionately used on women, as the definition of "mental defective" swelled to include moral undesirables such as prostitutes and unwed mothers —women whose children would only drain state coffers. [21]  Sexual misconduct, or the mere appearance of sexual misconduct, could be translated directly into proof of mental incompetence. As Le Sueur states matter-of-factly in "Women Are Hungry": "[a] girl is always considered a moral culprit when she begs in the city, and she is sterilized or sent away to a farm or a home" (156).

<15> On the first page of the novel the naïve girl already shows an awareness of this danger: "They will pick you up, Clara told me, and give you tests and sterilize you" (1). The "tests" Clara tells the girl about are Binet-Stanford intelligence tests designed to assess mental abilities for the purposes of prescribing eugenic sterilization. In "Women Are Hungry" Le Sueur describes a girl's encounter with the government-run charities who "want to have her sterilized" (149):

When she had her baby they gave her an intelligence test when she was scared stiff anyway, and it was about forests and she has never seen more than one tree at a time in her life. . . . Of course, she failed pretty thoroughly, because she was shaking like a leaf all the time . . . They asked her about the wrong kind of jungle (149).

Mabel's failure to pass the intelligence test shows a frightening correlation between the psychologically failed hungry subject and the state-determined definition of a "mental defective." A thorough interrogation of the uses of eugenic sterilization in Depression-era Minnesota and the ways such practices affected the lives of working-class women is beyond the scope of this essay. However, under conditions that threaten to resemble class extermination, the choice to have a baby despite society's judgment that one is unfit to reproduce may easily look like a radical gesture. If, as Rabinowitz argues, maternity builds history, then having the child that nobody wants is a way of refusing to capitulate with society's wish for one's historical nonexistence.

<16> Moreover, the resistance to eugenics discourse may also be read as a way to posit the needs of the body over other political affiliations, even radical ones. Eugenics discourse, which had gained popularity in the United States in the 1890s, remained closely allied with utopian movements throughout the early century, including various socialist and feminist movements. [22] A branch of popular science emerging from the widespread acceptance of Darwinism in the late nineteenth century, eugenicism articulated ideas for the improvement of the human race with which most socially responsible thinkers of the time had eventually to reckon. Michel Foucault's account of biopolitics, the disciplinary rhetoric of "life-enhancement" at the hands of the state, helps to explain why this would have been the case. [23] As the state strives to replace disciplinary control tactics entirely with biopower, "the power to 'make live' and 'let die'" (240), it increasingly attempts to purge those elements that would sap its resources—in a capitalist system, monetary resources. In the case of a progressive non-socialist state such as the New Deal-era United States, the dissemination of state "relief" puts pressure on the state to make distinctions between those populations worthy of scant resources and those that are not. Paradoxically, as the state approaches (but does not achieve) socialism, the lines by which some populations are excluded from the state's mandate to "make live" become more and more ideologically racist and eugenicist. Meridel Le Sueur's novel, by resisting the subordination of embodiment to political speech, resists this strain of thinking, which she had seen leveled at working-class women during the Depression.

<17> When Butch lies dying of a bullet wound after the botched robbery, the girl describes the wound as "a big mouth opening and shutting" and mournfully explains, "I didn't know how that mouth could ever be closed" (93). Here, Le Sueur not only reminds us of the connection between Butch's hunger and the violence that has been done to him, but also represents his hunger as coextensive with an endless yearning to speak and be heard. Butch babbles incoherently during his long death scene, his italicized speech temporarily taking over the narrative in a stream-of-consciousness monologue that rivals in length every other representation of speech in the book. Still hopeful of a recovery, the girl tries to calm Butch, but realizes "I couldn't make him be quiet now" (95). Similarly, Clara dies with her mouth "in an awful O shape" (128) that the girl interprets as a "silent screaming" (129). Hunger opens the mouth with a simultaneous desire to speak and to be fed, but only nonsense pours out; in the public sphere, the demands of the body sound like gibberish, or like nothing. However, the girl is determined to make hunger speak, and maternity provides the crucial grounds for reimagining the role of the body in political speech.

<18> Just after the girl decides to keep her baby in Chapter 32, she blurts out, "I'm hungry. I'll never have the things I want. Nobody can shut me up. I'm not going to be good, be happy, make plans, act like nothing has happened" (101). With this statement, the girl lays claim to the voice that Butch and Clara could not achieve. She rejects the conditions under which reproduction is not an option; she rejects the conditions under which her undifferentiated hunger for "a child, food, love" makes her a candidate for sterilization. If the girl's rhapsodic answer to these conditions, repeated several times during the birth scene, is "a breast for all . . . and milk for all" (127), her cry is less an injunction for women to stick to their roles as reproducers than a recognition that a mother's response to her children's hunger is the only appropriate one: "a fierce feeling . . . like you could feed them your body, and chop yourself up into little pieces" (36). The book insists on this urgent response to hunger, of which women's bodies are emblematic; Butch's mother literalizes this connection by claiming that the afterbirth "has more protein in it than any living thing" (132). The book ends with the girl's first words to her daughter, words which coexist for the first time with the delivery of food to a hungry subject who bears her own (non-)name: "O girl, I said down to her, giving her my full breast of milk" (132).

 

Notes

[1] Meridel Le Sueur, The Girl, rev. ed. 1990 (Albuquerque, NM: West End Press, 1978). [^]

[2] Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in US Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993). [^]

[3] Philip Rahv, "Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy," Southern Review 4 (Winter 1939), reprinted in Literature and the Sixth Sense (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 7-20. [^]

[4] Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia UP, 1993), esp. 37-40, "The Field of Cultural Production and the Field of Power." [^]

[5] See Foley, Radical Representations, esp. the Chapter 4, "Art or Propaganda?", 129-69; and Alan M. Wald, Writing From the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics (New York: Verso, 1994), esp. Chapter 2, "Alfred Kazin in Retrospect," 28-39. [^]

[6] Constance Coiner, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). [^]

[7] The classic account is in Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1961). See Wald's The New York Intellectuals (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987) and especially Foley's Radical Representations for alternative accounts of this process. [^]

[8] Julian Markels, "The Gramscian Ordeal of Meridel Le Sueur," The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003), 85-103. [^]

[9] I am rather freely adapting the concept of deterritorialization from Deleuze and Guattari's "What Is a Minor Literature?" (Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, eds. Russell Ferguson, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Martha Gever, and Cornel West (Boston: MIT, 1992), 59-69), partly based on how well The Girl fits their definition of minor literature as presented in this article. Deleuze and Guattari list the characteristics of minor literature as "deterritorialization of language, connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation" (60-61). [^]

[10] Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill, NC: UNCP, 1991). [^]

[11] Elaine Hedges, Introduction to Meridel Le Sueur's Ripening (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1990), 11. [^]

[12] Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980), reprinted in Journal of Women's History 15.3 (Autumn 2003), 11-48. [^]

[13] Nancy Frasier, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," Social Text, 25/26 (1990), 56-80. [^]

[14] Erin V. Obermueller, "Reading the Body in Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl," Legacy 22.1 (2005), 47-62. [^]

[15] Le Sueur, "Women Are Hungry," first published American Mercury (March 1934), reprinted in Ripening, ed. with an intro. by Elaine Hedges (Old Westbury, NY: New Feminist Press, 1982), 144-57. [^]

[16] In a move that seems to resist the designation of modernism in favor of Deleuze and Guattari's "collective assemblage of enunciation," Le Sueur claimed in 1978 that "[t]his memorial to the great and heroic women of the depression was really written by them. . . . There was no tape recorder then so I took their stories down" (133). She goes on to name the women who provided details for the novel from their own life stories. Stylistically, the novel accomplishes this feeling of collective enunciation in moments where the paragraph structure, the only typographic cue differentiating the characters' speech, breaks down. [^]

[17] Le Sueur, "Women On the Breadlines," first published New Masses (Jan. 1932), reprinted in Ripening, ed. with an intro. by Elaine Hedges (Old Westbury, NY: New Feminist Press, 1982), 137-43. [^]

[18] Laura Hapke, Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s (Athens, GA: U Georgia Press, 1995). [^]

[19] For a detailed description of the changes Meridel Le Sueur made to her manuscript in her late revision, see John F. Crawford, "The Book's Progress: The Making of The Girl" in the revised 1990 West End Press edition of The Girl, 137-46. [^]

[20] Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927). Accessed 10/28/05 (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?
court=US&vol=274&invol=200). [^]

[21] Alison C. Carey, in "Gender and Compulsory Sterilization Programs in America: 1907-1950" (Journal of Historical Sociology 11.1 (March 1998)), argues that the 1927 Supreme Court ruling disproportionately affected women even in states that were already practicing sterilization, because the Virginia law it upheld was biased against women. [^]

[22] Information on the link between socialist feminism and eugenics movements is particularly hard to come by in any unbiased form. Angela Franks's Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005) provides the most extensive bibliography I have found on this subject; however, given its distinct and obvious anti-feminist and anti-birth-control bias, I hesitate to cite it uncritically. Diane B. Paul's Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1995) presents a similar difficulty. Unfortunately, feminist scholarship on Sanger tends to produce the opposite bias, whitewashing the racist implications of her statements and published work such as The Pivot of Civilization (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003), which notably included an introduction by the unapologetic eugenicist H. G. Wells. Sorting through these connections with any degree of impartiality would be a project unto itself. [^]

[23] Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador,1997). The definition of biopower that I use here comes from Foucault's lecture of 17 March 1976, Chapter 11, 239-63. [^]

 

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