"On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. the first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled and looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed." - Diary, Saturday, 9th January, 1915
Virginia Woolf's doctors have been heavily condemned for their advocacy of eugenic programmes by those with little knowledge of the history of eugenics. And yet such views were commonplace and widely accepted at the time, and reflected in public attitudes, as Virginia Woolf exemplifies in this diary entry.
In pre-1914 years, when Winston Churchill was a Cabinet Minister, he said that 'the unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate.' The solution he proposed was that 'the source from which all the streams of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed.' This 'simple surgical operation' would allow these individuals 'to live in the world without causing much inconvenience to others.'
The National Socialist eugenic policies pursued by Germany in the 1930's should have brought such views into total disrepute, but sterilisation policies were pursued in many countries until recent years. Sweden, that bastion of social democracy, sterilised some 60,000 citizens between 1935 and 1976, mostly compulsorily, in pursuit of eugenic policies. They were not alone: other Scandinavian countries were involved, and Austria perhaps is up to the present day. Many American states had similar legislation.
Woolf's views and those of her doctors should be seen in this perspective. Similarly, anti-semitism - which Woolf could be accused of, despite her marriage to Leonard - was widespread and accepted at the time, sometimes coupled with racial eugenic theories. In 1907 Sidney Webb, a founding father of British socialism, could write a Fabian pamphlet deploring the falling birth-rate 'when children are being freely born to the Irish Roman Catholics and to the Polish, Russian and German Jews, on the one hand, and to the thriftless and irresponsible on the other. This can hardly result in anything but national deterioration, or, as an alternative, in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews.' It is important in this as in other areas to consider Woolf in the context of her times. She is so modern in many of her views that it easy to forget that in other ways she was very much of her period.
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