Zitationsvorschlag
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Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International.
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“They Were All Blondes”: Intersections of Racism, Feminism, and Eugenics in Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora
ABSTRACT This chapter will read Mary Bradley Lane’s largely unknown proto-feminist utopia Mizora (1881) with a specific focus on how the novel reflects notions of racial and moral purity, both of which are apparently portrayed as signifying social progress—a progress which eventually eliminates the male part of the human population. To situate the novel in its socio-political and cultural context, this interplay of different notions of purity will be read in the light of gendered readings of human evolution in the wake of Charles Darwin, where writers such as Eliza Burt Gamble or Charlotte Perkins Gilman envisage the female of the species as the primary and more perfect of the human sexes. Linking such ‘purification’ of humankind with Angelique Richardson’s notion of ‘eugenic feminism’ (2003), this article investigates how the ideals of Mizoran society as presented by Lane show that a proto-feminist, perfectly female utopia is inevitably accompanied by ideas of social and ethnic purity, all of which find their apotheosis in the all-blonde, all-female society in Mizora.
KEYWORDS eugenics, feminism, matriarchy, racism, utopia
