Figuring the Population Bomb

Gender and Demography in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Carole R. McCann

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295999111
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

Figuring the Population Bomb traces the genealogy of twentieth-century demographic "facts" that created a mathematical panic about a looming population explosion. This narrative was popularized in the 1970s in Paul Ehrlich's best-selling book The Population Bomb, which pathologized population growth in the Global South by presenting a doomsday scenario of widespread starvation resulting from that growth. Carole McCann uses an archive of foundational texts, disciplinary histories, participant reminiscences, and organizational records to reveal the gendered geopolitical grounds of the specialized mathematical culture, bureaucratic organization, and intertextual hierarchy that gave authority to the concept of population explosion. These demographic theories and measurement practices ignited the population "crisis" and moved nations to interfere in women's reproductive lives. Figuring the Population Bomb concludes that mid-twentieth-century demographic figures remain authoritative to this day in framing the context of transnational feminist activism for reproductive justice.

1

Matters of Vital Importance

Demography and the Mid-Twentieth-Century Population Imaginary

Discourses are not just “words”; they are material-semiotic practices through which objects of attention and knowing subjects are both constituted.

—DONNA HARAWAY

Closer inspection reveals that the numbers work most effectively in a world they have collaborated in creating.

—THEODORE PORTER

IN MAY 1968, THE SIERRA CLUB AND BALLANTINE BOOKS PUBlished The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich. The book’s doomsday scenario was announced on the cover. Below the title, in a linotype-style font highlighted in bright yellow, was the warning “WHILE YOU ARE READING THESE WORDS FOUR PEOPLE WILL HAVE DIED FROM STARVATION. MOST OF THEM CHILDREN.” In the lower left corner, an illustration of a cannonball-shape bomb appeared in a box above the words “The population bomb keeps ticking.”¹ The book opens with Ehrlich’s declaration that he has long understood the population explosion intellectually, but “came to understand it emotionally one hot stinking night in Delhi”: “The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. . . . People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. . . . since that night I’ve known the feel of overpopulation.”² Ehrlich then presents the academic case for overpopulation, noting that “no matter how you slice it, population is a numbers game.”³ The problem: after millennia of slow increases in human populations, an accelerating rate of growth meant that the “doubling time”⁴—the amount of time needed for world population to double in size—had decreased suddenly and dramatically. Moreover, as exemplified by his vignette of India, populations were not growing “uniformly over the face of the Earth” but appeared to be concentrated in “underdeveloped countries.”⁵ The solution: conscious regulation of human numbers through population control (voluntary contraception for the self-disciplined, mandatory contraception for those who are not), which, with vigilance, might defuse the population bomb in time.⁶

Ehrlich was not the first to use bomb imagery. Demographers had suggested it in the first accounts of sudden, rapid growth in the mid-1940s. The Population Bomb also was the title of Hugh Moore’s 1954 self-published pamphlet, which he regularly updated for more than a decade. During the midcentury years when the works of Moore and Ehrlich circulated, the phrases population bomb and the more common population explosion became firmly established as fact in the social imaginary.⁷ Historians and demographers generally dismiss Moore and Ehrlich as ethnocentric alarmists who overstated the crisis and underestimated the power of technical progress to accommodate growth. But the population figures that grounded their arguments were not—and are not—questioned.⁸ Those figures—both the numbers and their explosiveness—were the products of US demography, and their impact endures.⁹

A relatively young social science, demography blossomed in the mid-twentieth century as part of the US-dominated development paradigm. With boundless confidence in science, the post–World War II generation of US social scientists studied and prescribed technical solutions to the problems of world “hunger” and “want,” which were then perceived as testing American international leadership.¹⁰ Drawing on Malthusian discourse, US demographers identified rapid population growth as an underlying cause of poverty and offered population control as the solution. They staked their epistemic authority on innovative statistical techniques and organizational sites for measuring population dynamics.¹¹ In response to what they claimed was the “chaotic state” of population knowledge after the war, they worked through the United Nations to standardize global data gathering.¹² Through disciplinary powerhouses such as the Princeton University Office of Population Research (OPR) and the Population Council, an NGO founded by John D. Rockefeller III, US demographers dominated the production of knowledge about current population patterns and projections of future trends. By 1968, they had helped organize and fund half a dozen or more academic departments and research centers in the United States, Asia, and Latin America.¹³ Together these institutions trained a multinational cadre of population scientists who staffed statistical bureaus in emerging nations of the Global South. US demographers also provided technical assistance to family planning programs around the world. This network of regional, national, international, and nongovernmental organizations provided the institutional and epistemic grounding for the official statistics by which the new problems of rapid population growth and its control were understood and worried over.¹⁴ The confidence with which demographic figures were quoted in the press, in related scientific disciplines, in public policy debates, and at cocktail parties shows how effectively demographic statistical reasoning assembled the credibility of mid-twentieth-century population facts.¹⁵ The extent to which population facts moved individuals, NGOs, and nations to ever more urgent interventions into procreative processes demonstrates how much demographic numbers mattered.

Much attention has been paid to the most visible effect of the mid-twentieth-century population crisis: population control through state-sponsored family planning. In particular, transnational feminist scholarship and activism have excavated the racial, class-based, and imperialist gender biases underlying coercive population control practices across the globe.¹⁶ This invaluable work has been critical to political efforts to end such practices. Yet the tight focus on population control practices has limited our understanding of the politics of gender, race, class, and “coloniality” inscribed in population knowledge.¹⁷ That is, the history of the demographic facts and figures that fueled the population panic and animated population control has been largely ignored.¹⁸ The production of those facts—the disciplinary milieu, institutional infrastructure, affective economies, and inferential modalities—is obscured by the solidity of the numbers.¹⁹ Even in demographic texts, details about the construction of the numeric figures are relegated to appendices, which are generally decipherable only by experts.²⁰ But as Susan Greenhalgh notes in her important study of population governance in contemporary China, it is “in the making” of “numeric inscriptions—those mundane tables, figures, charts, and equations—. . . that population scientists . . . do some of their most important yet least studied work.”²¹

This book traces the social-epistemic genealogy of mid-twentieth-century demographic knowledge.²² It shows how the history of demographic facts and figures is crucial to a fuller understanding of the gendered geopolitics that authorized the conscious limitation of fertility as a governing technology and a normative requirement of modern citizenship globally. Beginning with the observation that scientific knowledge is produced in specific times and places, and inscribes those circumstances within it, the analysis investigates the social, affective, and epistemic contours of the context in which demographers “discovered” the population crisis.²³ The following chapters investigate the complex and shifting relationships between the social worlds of demography, its publics, and its rivals, highlighting the tensions and accommodations that have delimited the discipline’s boundaries.²⁴ Through close readings of foundational texts, disciplinary histories, participant reminiscences, and archival records, the analysis elucidates the grounds of the “shared mathematical culture,” “bureaucratic organization,” and “intertextual hierarchy” that assembled the facts of the midcentury population crisis and gave them epistemic and affective authority.²⁵ In particular, the analysis excavates the gendered geopolitics of the social networks, cultural anxieties, and discursive modalities that configured the “knowing subjects,” “rituals of truth,” “domain of objects,” and “global designs” that held mid-twentieth-century population figures together.²⁶ It demonstrates that the population crisis problematization was not merely a gloss on the data or a misapprehension of the facts. Rather, it was a constitutive element of the historically situated “knowledge culture” in which demographic questions were asked and the numbers were calculated.²⁷ The analysis demonstrates that demographic theory and measurement practices constructed “procedure[s] of reasoning”²⁸ about fertility, mortality, growth, modernization, and economic development that ignited the population crisis and moved nations to act.²⁹ Demographic knowledge configured a mathematical panic that pathologized population growth in the Global South and intensified the scrutiny of and interventions into women’s reproductive lives.

Hegemonic Masculinity and Manly States

The analysis brings into focus the gendered grammar of coloniality inscribed in demographic facts and illuminates the cultural work they performed within the interconnected cognitive frameworks and affective alignments of mid-twentieth-century hegemonic masculinity.³⁰ It uses a transnational feminist science studies lens that takes account of the temporal, spatial, and affective specificity of the configuration of scientific knowledges and practices. It recognizes the multiple and heterogeneous ways that the effects of science play out in different times and places, while also recognizing the encumbrances of the gendered, racialized coloniality of knowledge shaping those histories. Moreover, rejecting the positivist splitting of knowledge and emotion, this analysis recognizes that knowledge cultures, as socially and historically situated sites of human endeavor, are always imbued with configurations of normative sentiments that bind ideas and affects together in politically inflected tangles.

One component of the analytic lens used here draws on Sara Ahmed’s explication of how “accumulation of affective value shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds.” Her work on the cultural politics of emotion illustrates that as affects circulate in social historical worlds, repetitive associations between some signs, objects, and figures become “sticky.” That stickiness binds them tightly together and immobilizes them.³¹ Using the tools of cultural analysis, feminist interrogation of such immobilized signs opens space to “imagine otherwise.” The signs of overpopulation—excessive fertility, poverty—and the bodies of Third World women compose one such sticky figuration in the flow between signs and bodies in and through population discourse. The analysis brings into focus another less obvious but vitally important sticky figure constructed in this discourse, the Malthusian man, who binds mathematics and masculinity into the authoritative subject of population knowledge. By tracing the repetitive association of these signs and bodies in specific sites of their construction, the analysis exhumes the affects, the structure of feeling that has organized population knowledge and, thereby, opens space to “learn” the “lessons” of the population explosion “otherwise.”³²

The concept of hegemonic masculinities, developed by sociologist Raewyn Connell, is a second particularly useful tool for excavating the complicated and multiple assemblages of gender, race, and coloniality in demographic figures.³³ It locates gender in the social processes that organize “the reproductive arena,” both in “configurations of practice” and “discursive constructions.” From this point of view, “masculinity and femininity are produced together in a process that constitutes the gender order.” Moreover, binary masculinities and femininities are conceptualized as both biosocial places in gender relations and configurations of affects and practices that engage those places.³⁴ Following Gramsci’s conceptualization, hegemonic masculinity theory assumes that “active struggle for dominance” is “implicit” in gender regimes. Gender struggles involve multifaceted contestations over both the boundaries between and the hierarchies within gender categories. Hegemonic masculinity is thus “the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy” as both subordinations of women/femininity and hierarchies of men/masculinity. That is, “hegemonic masculinity is hegemonic [in] so far as it embodies a successful strategy in relation to women” that “guarantees” men’s dominance and women’s subordination. But in addition to settling relations between genders, hegemonic masculinity implies “the ability to impose a particular definition on other kinds of masculinity.”³⁵ Historically and geographically situated gender regimes are thus the products of always tense, contingent relations between and within gender groups. Moreover, gender regimes, configured in local milieus and moments, are never stable. Contested by women, masculine rivals, and masculine subordinates, settled gender relations are subject to recurring crises.³⁶

Configurations of gender become hegemonic to the extent that they are invested in cultural discourses and institutional practices that allocate power, authority, legitimacy, and emotionality in relation to gender exemplars. These exemplary figures embody narratives of masculine mastery that explain why things “are as ...