A Eugenic Welfare State? Reproduction and Productivity in the Nordic Countries

The implementation of eugenic-inspired sterilization legislations in the late 1920s and 1930s marked the endpoint of long debates about the realization of eugenic ideology in all five Nordic countries, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. This paper looks on the impact eugenic ideas and ideology had on the development of the concept of citizenship in the Nordic welfare state. The main question which shall be answered is how the gendered concepts of reproduction and productivity shaped in the context of the eugenic debates the idea of citizenship in the Nordic welfare state. I seek in this paper for a wider understanding of eugenics away from a scientific perspective to a cultural and social interpretation as a way of life (Cogdell 2004, Weindling 2013) The paper looks in particular on the debate about the enhancement of female civil rights through eugenic feminists (Ziegler 2008) in the Nordic countries. Eugenic feminists aimed for a positioning of women through their ability to reproduce in the middle of the society by emphasising their social and political importance for the nation. Eugenic ideology with its stressing of the importance of betterment of the quality of the population provided an ideal background for feminist’s claims. I argue that eugenic feminists seek to position women predominately through their ability to reproduce in the society, in opposite to men, who were positioned through their labour market participation. This division became later a shaping idea in the Nordic welfare state. The paper is based on an intersectional analysis how eugenic feminists used social categories like class, race, sex or disability to position women in the discourse about citizenship and actively argued for the exclusion of some women from citizenship based on their ability of invaluable reproduction.