Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Eugenic feminism


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 12:20, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Eugenic feminism

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This is a remarkable coatrack of WP:SYNTH designed to take the kernel of truth, that some early feminists were also eugenicists, to suggest a whole school of pro-Eugenic feminist thought. Should also get a healthy dose of WP:SALT for the WP:COATRACK it is. Simonm223 (talk) 12:56, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment I am uncertain how this can be WP:SYNTH when the term was literally coined by Caleb Saleeby over 100 years ago, and there have been several books written about the topic (as well as journal articles). IntoThinAir (talk) 13:29, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * The existence of the term in published sources doesn't at all rule out the possibility of synthesizing those sources to make a claim that none of the sources themselves do. Indeed, Original Research by way of synthesis requires pre-existing sources. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 02:29, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep Now I really don't like coatracks, but this doesn't appear to be one. Plenty of good sources are provided that specifically work with that term. -- Elmidae (talk · contribs) 13:56, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment There does seem to be some concerted external attempt at smearing the feminist movement by conflating these two terms, and overstating the sympathies for eugenics by a handful of early feminists. I'm suspicious of some of the sources (partisan sources?), and there are neutrality issues in many sections. However, I think if the article had more than one noteworthy contributor it may become more balanced in the future. AbrahamCat (talk) 14:35, 20 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Keep This is well referenced with sources that indicate the term was used over 100 years ago, and that it has also been studied recently, so it does have a place in an encyclopaedia. If there are quality and balance issues with the article, they will no doubt be worked on by others contributing to it. RebeccaGreen (talk) 14:46, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment I don't believe the effort that will be necessary to keep this as anything other than a misogynistic coatrack warrants retaining it on the encyclopedia. As it stands it certainly isn't a good article and I'm honestly still deeply disappointed that it was let out of drafts. Especially as so many of the keep comments in the MfD discussion of the draft were, "it's unlikely to get out of drafts anyway, so..." Simonm223 (talk) 15:17, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep This is an often-used historical term, and although the article can use some improvement I think it's too important to delete. Skirts89 (talk) 16:09, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep. Clearly treated as a topic - e.g. 1: Seitler, Dana. "Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Regeneration Narratives." American Quarterly 55.1 (2003): 61-88., 2: Ziegler, Mary. "Eugenic feminism: Mental hygiene, the women's movement, and the campaign for eugenic legal reform, 1900-1935." Harv. JL & Gender 31 (2008): 211., 3: Nadkarni, Asha. Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India. U of Minnesota Press, 2014., 4: Gibbons, Sheila. "“Our Power to Remodel Civilization”: The Development of Eugenic Feminism in Alberta, 1909–1921." Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 31.1 (2014): 123-142.. Icewhiz (talk) 17:00, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment This page was one of the worse messes of copyvio that I've seen in a while. I tried to clean it up, but if that's the level of work that went into the draft, then it doesn't bode well for the quality of the research done. Even having worked on the page, I'm halfway inclined to WP:TNT. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 17:42, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * When I ran the copy-vio check it was primarily because of quoting out of Eugenics in the United States, which was itself copy pasted into an external wiki that copyviobot thought looked fishy,even though it originated form wikipedia. If you exclude that, the automatic number goes down considerably(I put in a whitelist for the bot). I'm not really clear on what protocol is for that sort of thing, but I assume that's not a problem since it's GFDL'd and there's a backlink. I found the wording of the main article to be adequate, so I left it basically verbatim. I know the prose could use some work, but I've seen worse articles on the wiki, so I figured other users with better composition would fix the balance/wording. Perhaps even you might like to take a crack at it. Ethanpet113 (talk) 17:52, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Did you note anywhere that you'd copied from Eugenics in the United States? See Copying within Wikipedia. SarahSV (talk) 18:04, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Ah I see, I will provide a dummy edit.Ethanpet113 (talk) 18:41, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Everything I removed was copied from the external sources, e.g., "A prominent early figure of the feminist movement was Marie Stopes" etc. from ; "a branch of the early feminist movement that made use of some of the core principles of eugenics" etc., and "McClung was one of the most prominent advocates of women’s rights in Canada in the early twentieth century" etc. from . These passages did not occur in Eugenics in the United States. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 00:37, 21 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Keep (or Merge (somewhere)) clearly a topic, with multiple sources. Bogger (talk) 09:39, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep: the sources show it to be a notable concept. Pam  D  12:02, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep. Clearly is a notable topic, per everyone above.-- Literaturegeek |  T@1k?  20:52, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep as per others in thread above. I would not support a merge or redirect. I think the subject has clearly demonstrated notability per guidelines and was clearly thought of by others as a "movement" in and of itself. Plus there are many books I can think of off the top of my head (The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore comes to mind) which cover this as a distinct social entity and strain of thought. I think it deserves coverage, especially for when someone googles "why were so many early feminists also eugenecists?" The article serves a public good. -- Shibboleth ink (♔ ♕) 21:04, 25 November 2018 (UTC)*
 * Send to Draft . This article clearly fails WP:NPOV and its purpose seems to be for discrediting Margaret Sanger, if not other early feminists. It's unknown to me if a neutral version of this article can even exist, so it's a delete from me, even though the article appears to pass notability and sourcing standards. Other than that it's just poorly written and clearly lacking in content. Onetwothreeip (talk) 21:39, 25 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, the lead is almost all about Sanger, for no discernible reason. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 02:22, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete: WP:TNT. Onetwothreeip (talk) 02:59, 26 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Delete I am troubled that there has not been enough analysis of what is going on. Just because someone was vocally for Eugenics and also vocally for women's sufferage does not mean they combined the two concepts. That two opinions are held by the same person does not make them a notable overlap.John Pack Lambert (talk) 00:54, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Draftify Delete Just because an article could in principle be written about a topic doesn't mean that the article we have is the right way to go about it. Sure, you can find the term in books, but that's only the first step. There are real questions here about people applying a term to themselves versus others applying it to them in retrospect, about the distinction between an organized movement and a set of people espousing roughly similar ideas at roughly the same time, etc. This needs further work by specialists before it could have a chance at being encyclopedic. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 02:03, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Also, there was even more copyvio than I thought. Different versions of eugenic feminism arose between 1890 and 1930, but each shared in the argument that the eugenic decline of the race could be prevented only if women were granted greater political, social, sexual, and economic equality is copied almost exactly from Ziegler (2008). Giving a footnote to the paper you copied from doesn't keep it from being plagiarism. Nor does changing "found commonality" to "shared". The phrase "women's moral superiority toward social space" is lifted from this website, and its setting is only lightly changed. I would flunk a student who handed in a paper like this. I now doubt that it is even a reasonable foundation on which an encyclopedia article could be built. WP:TNT. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 02:43, 26 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Women-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 14:04, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 16:36, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 16:36, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Philosophy-related deletion discussions. Thsmi002 (talk) 12:44, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Disability-related deletion discussions. Thsmi002 (talk) 12:44, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Discrimination-related deletion discussions. Thsmi002 (talk) 12:44, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Social science-related deletion discussions. Thsmi002 (talk) 12:44, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions.  Shibboleth ink  (♔ ♕) 21:00, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Atlantic306 (talk) 21:20, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep. Deletion is not cleanup. There is ample treatment of the topic in secondary sources. Srnec (talk) 01:19, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep there are more than enough good sources, and "not cleanup". Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 19:05, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep notable and well referenced --DannyS712 (talk)
 * Further comment: I have been removing details unrelated to eugenic feminism but this is causing much of the article to be diminished. It seems the article is entirely written to observe early feminists who supported eugenics, rather than eugenic feminism itself. While an article with that name could exist, it doesn't appear to be the article that exists there now. The main editor of the article is clearly biased. Onetwothreeip (talk) 21:36, 4 December 2018 (UTC)


 * Delete unreliable article, partly based on falsehoods (see section about Sanger). The Banner  talk 21:41, 4 December 2018 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.