“We wear the bandages, but our limbs have not grown to them”: Eugenic Feminism and Female Economic Dependence in Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This chapter maps a range of responses to eugenic feminism in the New Woman fiction and non-fictional writing of Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. More particularly the chapter considers how, within the framework of their eugenic/anti-eugenic visions, imagery derived from popular science (insects, entomology and microscopy, for instance) offered New Woman writers the perspectival mobility to reflect on the larger structural problems within the division of labour and, at the same time, magnify those insidious social ties and expectations that circumscribe women at a local level. The chapter argues that insect organisation and biology provided a suggestive mechanism through which to imagine different evolutionary futures for the human species and provide a compelling rationale to grant women their equal share in human industry and intellectual life