اصلاح نژاد، تربیت جنسیتی و تغییر اجتماعی: ساخت موضوع مسئول دولت جمهوری دوم اسپانیا

This study focuses on eugenics in Spain, and more specifically on the ‘official’ eugenics whose platform was the Primeras Jornadas Eugénicas Españolas (First Spanish Eugenic Days, FSED). The aim of this paper is to relate eugenics to ‘governmentality’ rather than to State politics alone and to ‘Latin eugenics’ rather than to ‘mainline eugenics’. On the one hand, the FSED were largely centred on the development of a new sexual code which would set Catholic sexual morality aside. For this reason, sexual pedagogy was one of the most relevant topics during the FSED, personal responsibility becoming the first step to social change. The concern about making people play an active role in their own self-regulation is typical of governmentality. The latter refers to societies where power is decentered and where the objective is to structure the field of action of others (the conduct of conduct). On the other hand, the FSED emphasised preventive eugenics such as welfare programmes and health campaigns rather than negative eugenics such as the sterilisation of the unfit. The situation in Spain was mirrored in countries such as Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, which allows us to think about them in terms of ‘Latin eugenics’ rather than ‘mainline eugenics’ from countries such as Great Britain, Germany and the USA.

The historical significance of eugenics has stimulated a substantial increase of studies on the topic in the last decades. Some of these recent works, such as the excellent contribution of Nancy L. Stephan (1991) to the Latin American sphere, allow us to appreciate the importance of considering eugenics in the context of national intellectual and scientific traditions. The fact that science is a social activity, which cannot be sealed off from the values of the society, requires us to pay attention to the social and political life within which it is practised. In the light of the above I have examined eugenics in Spain, specifically ‘official’ eugenics whose platform was the Primeras Jornadas Eugénicas Españolas (First Spanish Eugenic Days, FSED) in 1933:2 that is, as a scientific venture that was shaped by different factors particular to the historical place in which it appeared. Thus we should take into account the fact that the eugenics movement in Spain reached its highest point of development in the early 1930s, the years of the Second Republic (the national context) and the inter-war period (the international context). This double context is one of the keys to understanding why eugenics was deemed to be a relevant strategy (although not the only one) for social change.

In this paper, I have shown that eugenics in the Second Republic was intricately linked to the Spanish context. Even if we usually think about eugenics as related to a specific scientific theory and to certain specific practices, we cannot forget that science is a social activity which is shaped by different factors particular to the historical place in which it appears, as declared at the beginning of this paper. We have seen that sexual pedagogy was one of the principal concerns of eugenicists, who intended to deal with it without theological prejudices. It is true that the Encyclical Casti Connubii of Pope Pius the Eleventh promulgated in 1930 rejected the obligatory premarital certificate and sterilisation, in line with what most of Spanish intellectuals defended. But also according to most of them, the Church had no authority in the sphere of sexuality and reproduction. In fact, other measures, such as abortion and divorce, which were prohibited by the Church, were accepted in the Second Republic. In addition, instead of arguing that family, marriage or sexuality were ‘sacred rights’, several authors presented practical problems in addition to their warnings about possible abuses of power. For example, regarding the most problematic practice of sterilisation, there was the argument that it was an irreversible measure and conceivably not appropriate in the light of inadequate knowledge about hereditary transmission (Jiménez de Asúa explicitly criticised Lombroso’s idea of the natural-born criminal