Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938

Through nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, family, and the home, argues Laura Lovett, influential leaders in early twentieth-century America constructed and legitimated a range of reforms that promoted human reproduction. Their pronatalism emerged from a modernist conviction that reproduction and population could be regulated. European countries sought to regulate or encourage reproduction through legislation; America, by contrast, fostered ideological and cultural ideas of pronatalism through what Lovett terms 'nostalgic modernism, ' which romanticized agrarianism and promoted scientific racism and eugenics.