Introduction: eugenic feminism and the problem of national development -- Perfecting feminism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's eugenic utopias -- Regenerating feminism: Sarojini Naidu's eugenic feminist renaissance -- "World menace": national reproduction, public health, and the Mother India debate -- The vanishing peasant mother: reimagining Mother India for the 1950s -- Severed limbs, severed legacies: Indira Gandhi's emergency and the problem of subalternity -- Epilogue: transnational surrogacy and the neoliberal Mother India
Summary
Asha Nadkarni contends that whenever feminists lay claim to citizenship based on women's biological ability to 'reproduce the nation', they are participating in a eugenic project - sanctioning reproduction by some and prohibiting it by others. Employing a wide range of sources from the United States and India, the book shows how the exclusionary impulse of eugenics is embedded within the terms of nationalist feminism
