ABSTRACT
During the 1890s, Everett Millais, son of the painter Sir John Everett Millais, spent some time trying to fertilize dogs without them copulating. He reported his results to the embryologist Walter Heape, who was undertaking similar experiments with artificial fertilization in other species. Heape in turn was working with Francis Galton, as they investigated ways in which to make human fertilization more efficient. More than a century later and the problems that they encountered in their experiments are all but overcome, though their motivation, the efficient breeding of the right type of human, occupies a more controversial place in history. Many of the motivations behind improving human reproductivity have a far from kindly motive – much of the concern in the early twentieth century came about because of a dearth of healthy soldiers. Successful reproduction was deemed of national importance in the context of military and imperial imperatives. The first section of this chapter examines the ways in which population became a resource to be encouraged and controlled. Men of science such as Heape were very aware of the wider concerns attached to their work. Heape was the first person to perform embryo transfer experiments successfully but he was not concerned with giving women more choice and certainly not with giving them more power. In fact he feared that women were trying to escape their reproductive destinies. Despite the presence of a number of married women with children in the suffrage movement, Heape saw voting women as likely to be un(re) productive ‘waste products’ of society:
we are thus confronted with the probability, that extended power given to women will result in the waste products of our Female population gaining power to order the habits and regulate the work of those women who are of real value to us as a nation.1
