Conceiving the Future

“A useful complement to recent studies. . . . Contributes significantly to the further unraveling of . . . tenuous and slippery connections.” — The Journal of American History

“A thoughtful and probing book that backdates the emergence of pronationalism in the United States to the late nineteenth century and exposes intersections of nostalgia, eugenics, motherhood, and the idealization of the white frontier family from the 1890s to the 1930s. . . . A nicely textured analysis.” — ISIS

“A richly detailed, well-organized, and thoroughly researched narrative analyzing how perceptions about rural America, gender, race, and the family shaped pronatalist public policy around the turn of the twentieth century.” — New England Quarterly

“Touches on several different fields of American historical scholarship — women’s history, history of children and the family, rural history, environmental history, labor history, history of science, and history of the West. Its method, however, is solidly grounded in the history of ideas.” — Journal of Interdisciplinary History

“Readers of this imaginative book will see many issues in a fresh light. They may be inspired to think in new ways about the connections between Americans' environmentalism, their celebration of the family, and their anxieties about women’s roles outside the home.” — Kansas History

“This eclectic mix of major and minor players and familiar and unfamiliar reform efforts demonstrates the ubiquity of pronatalist thought and its ideological flexibility.” — Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

“Lovett will surely help persuade social scientists of the joys and ironies of cultural history.” — PDR

“Lovett offers incisive intellectual portraits and a challenging analysis of how gender and race informed the dynamic of residual agrarianism and emergent scientific and governmental regulation in the Populist and Progressive eras.” — H-Net Reviews

“A thoughtful and original approach to understanding the power of pronatalism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture.” — Journal of Social History

“Conceiving the Future puts the history of reproductive regulation on the map, illuminating the Progressive Era marriage of agrarian ideology with scientism in the name of a ‘better’ (white) race and stronger nation. Lovett’s finely grained and well-researched case studies represent the best of a new turn to intellectual portraiture." — Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara