From Sentimentality to Science: Social Utility, Feminist Eugenics and The End of The Road in Progressive Era America

Abstract

Given the sensational appeal of Katherine Davis's The End of the Road, leading to its unofficial designation in The Exhibitor's Herald as ‘the most talked about Picture in America’ in 1919, it is surprising the film has not received greater critical attention for its peculiarly feminist eugenic vision. Reading The End of the Road alongside other US government hygiene films and contemporaneous journal articles and medical texts, I reveal a different vision of Progressive Era eugenics than that found in the well-known work of Shelley Stamp, Martin Pernick and Stacie Colwell. Drawing a distinction between what the progressives themselves termed ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ eugenics, I explore hygiene cinema's unexpected intersection with first-wave feminism, progressive economics and welfare reform. In so doing, I reveal a window into a nearly-forgotten feminist counter-culture that briefly attained governmental support due to the overlap in membership between the American Social Hygiene Association and the US War Department. At the centre of this vision is The End of the Road’s eugenic heroine, Mary, who is neither a wife nor a mother but a college-educated working woman who promotes the ‘development of oneself for the service of mankind’.