What do sex, robots, trees and test-tube babies have to do with each other, one might well ask on reading McLaren's list of seemingly disparate topics. As the author of a number of previous books that have explored the intersections of sexology, science and society, McLaren took up what he saw as a puzzle. He explains that while studying eugenicist Marie Stopes and her husband Reginald Ruggles Gates, he discovered in the archives that Gates was part of a group called Men of the Trees. What did this eager eugenicist from the early twentieth century see in a project that seemed focused on conservation of nature rather than human population control?
The answer lies in the shared emphasis on reproduction. McLaren's interest lies in the fact that in the interwar period in the United Kingdom, a number of popular writers saw reproduction as increasingly likely to be carried out by design. Questions about what it means to be modern, the role of technology and control, and the way popular culture took up such issues form the central topic of this book. In particular, McLaren tells us clearly that his central argument is that ‘reproduction was a key site for many of those debating the needs of the modern mechanized world’ (p. 2).
This is not a history of scientific ideas or of technology, but primarily of science fiction, literature and imagination. In the period between the wars, fresh with the horrors and worries of the first shocking ‘Great’ war in mind, many writers imagined the future. Some saw hope in being able to design and control reproduction so that we would end up without too many people and with the right kinds of people. Some saw the future not with hopeful fascination but with fear. They imagined brave new worlds of engineered societies and controlled reproduction. The reactions depended, in part, on whether the individuals themselves or some controlling authority were thought to be doing the designing.
While many of the writings and cases that McLaren includes are familiar, he pulls them together and adds into the mix many stories that are not well known (and not even good literature, as he notes) to reflect the views and values of society in a challenging historic period. Actually, he includes work from the late nineteenth century as well, but the focus remains on the interwar period.
The first section considers ‘speculative literature and mechanistic progress’ in which the focus is on ideas and futuristic thinking. Here we encounter the familiar Brave New World and writings by well-known authors such as the Haldanes and Russells. Marriage, sex, motherhood and reproduction figure most prominently, as a modern society struggled to redefine family individual roles. In addition, these moderns found machines fascinating. Automobiles brought power and became entangled with images of sex. Robots both enchanted and appalled readers of science fiction imaginations of the future.
Section Two moves ‘beyond the predictive’ to ‘sex in real time’. Here we learn of less familiar efforts to control sex and reproduction through physiology. If hormones shape much of sexual response, then controlling hormones should provide a way to ‘improve’ sex. The Viennese physiologist Eugen Steinach offers one example, with his efforts to rejuvenate males. At first Steinach experimented with transplantations of glands from apes to man, the ‘monkey gland’ procedure. He theorized that if the glands produce useful hormones, then grafting those glands from younger individuals into older ones should rejuvenate the sexual functions of the older humans. It seemed clear even at the time that this was not really likely to be doing what Steinach imagined, yet eager patients were willing to give the experiment a try. Steinach also tried other procedures, including vasectomies, on the theory that removing the flow of fluids would redirect the sexual energies to allow more activity.
The emphasis on sex and sexual activity included discussion of homosexuality and its causes and effects. McLaren uses these cases to make the point that the British public did not shy away from discussing sex during this interwar period but embraced open public discussion through literature and physiological experiments.
For women, artificial insemination captured the imagination. McLaren makes clear that reality and imagination mixed easily in discussions of women and syringes as a mode of reproduction. One particularly unlikely-seeming trial received considerable public attention, as a woman asserted that she had used artificial insemination to have the child that her husband claimed was the result of adultery. This raised questions about whether using another man's sperm could be considered adulterous. Public opinion was highly mixed, both collectively and even for individuals trying to understand what was real and what was good.
The final section turns to the mix of human reproduction and conservation of trees with ‘romantic racialism’. Here McLaren is at his best in enticing our imaginations, while also at his most frustrating in providing tantalizing titbits but not very much analysis. He does, in this section, explain Gates's Men of the Trees. Eugenicists wanted to preserve the human population, controlling and designing reproduction. They wanted to preserve a world that they valued, even as machines and modernism threatened that world (for conservatives) or raised a rich variety of possibilities (for liberals). Proponents on both sides, but especially conservatives, sought to preserve and conserve. Humans ought not to mix stocks or to mix races in ways that might threaten the survival of either. Mixing would bring degeneration, they assumed, and both liberals and conservatives were convinced that they had a responsibility to protect society and the environment in which we live. It is not surprising that a society that had experienced the First World War would worry about the future and be concerned to get it right.
The book is rich in introducing many ideas and creative in bringing together strands from threads of different kinds. Readers of many kinds will find pieces of interest here. McLaren is not giving us a deep analysis, nor does the book engage the existing scholarly literature about history of conservation, history of eugenics, or history of reproductive science and its social context. Yet he brings together many stories and different threads of society that typically are not discussed together, so that the juxtaposition challenges us to think about what else might be connected. Some scholars will want to note that others have already long pointed to the rather logical and not surprising connections between those who sought control of human reproduction and those concerned with control of nature. But that is not the point of this book, which is instead a cross-cutting romp through many different fields with an often playful tone.
