Early Socialists were in love with eugenics. In the 1900s-1920s, the cool thing was to be a feminist Socialist who was into eugenics. Or a Socialist eugenicist who was into feminism. Or any other combination of the same three things.
So how did it all work?
These non-Soviet Socialists were genuinely worried about poverty. Why did so many people live in such terrible, subhuman penury? What was causing this? Oppression, obviously, was the Socialists’ answer. But what made this oppression possible?
The poor had too many children, was the answer. They were too stupid to control their procreation and ended up having large numbers of children. Their children were as dumb as their parents because of heredity, and there were so many of these congenital morons that it was impossible to introduce any rational, progressive measures into society.
These aren’t my ideas, of course. I find this kind of thinking not only immoral but unsupportable. As we can all see, neither contraception not collapsing birth rates eliminated poverty.
But back then this seemed like a plausible explanation. So the way to eliminate poverty was to have feminists convince women to stop procreating that much, which would gladden the eugenicists by improving the quality of the human stock, and that, in turn, would please Socialists because the resulting higher-quality humans wouldn’t be so poor.
The crimes of the Nazi Germany made it impossible to wish openly to get rid of lower-quality human beings in favor of higher-quality ones. So now the intellectual heirs of those early eugenicist Socialists claim that there should be fewer people because people are bad for the nature.
But you can see how the underlying ideas haven’t really changed that much.
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