The Sexual Politics of Ectogenesis in the To-day and To-morrow Series

Abstract

The present study investigates the concept of ectogenesis and the debate that accrued around it in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, especially as it was discussed in the ‘To-day and To-morrow’ series of books and the circle of intellectuals associated with it. I will look in particular at J. B. S. Haldane's Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1923), Anthony Ludovici's Lysistrata, or Woman's Future and Future Woman (1924), Norman Haire's Hymen, or the Future of Marriage (1927), Vera Brittain's Halcyon, or the Future of Monogamy (1929), J. D. Bernal's The World, The Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929) and Eden Paul's Chronos, or the Future of the Family (1930).

I will also briefly examine some contemporary fictional depictions of ectogenesis, which were clearly influenced by the books mentioned above, and which directly intervened in the debate around the development of foetuses in artificial wombs. I will look at Charlotte Haldane's Man's World (1926) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which can be seen as engaged in a critical dialogue with some of the books of the ‘To-day and To-morrow’ series. Naomi Mitchison's Solution Three (1975) and J. B. S. Haldane's The Man With Two Memories (1976) continued to address this debate in the 1970s, among a cluster of utopian novels in the period, mostly written by women.

While ectogenesis stands at the root of a fantasy which could be equated with masculine womb envy, the dream of becoming a male mother and thus dispensing almost totally with women, for women, on the other hand, extra-uterine pregnancy, combined with cloning techniques, could constitute an enabling vision of autonomy from the male, but also a potentially threatening one, as Ludovici propounds. The vexed issues surrounding the fantasy of extra-uterine gestation will thus be examined and problematized.