Man’s World

Charlotte Haldane (1894-1969) was a journalist who advocated for divorce reform and married women’s employment . . . while also idealizing motherhood. In 1926, the year that Man’s World was published, she married the eminent biologist J. B. S. Haldane. Her 1927 book, Motherhood and Its Enemies, made a progressive argument for easier access to contraceptives for women . . . while enraging feminists by arguing that only after having borne children could a woman be regarded as ＂normal.＂ She went on to found the Science News Service, and reported on World War II from the Russian Front.

Philippa Levine is Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas, and Director of British, Irish, and Empire Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of, among other books, Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (2017), The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset (3rd edition, 2019), and the forthcoming The Tree of Knowledge: Science, Art and the Naked Form. With Alison Bashford, she is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (2010).