Send in the Clones? Naomi Mitchison and the Politics of Reproduction and Motherhood

Naomi Mitchison was positioned centrally within twentieth century debates about reproduction. She was the sister of Communist geneticist J. B. S. Haldane; the enthusiastic mother of seven children; a birth control activist and a very sceptical member of the Eugenics Society; part of the feminist circle around the journal Time and Tide; and involved in socialist politics. While issues around motherhood were significant in her earlier historical and realist fiction, during the 1960s she turned to science fiction to explore questions of breeding and reproduction further. This essay will incorporate a discussion of her 1930s writings on and activism in birth control and opinions on eugenics into the later developments of these themes in her speculative fictions. In Memoirs of a Spacewoman and Solution Three she addressed intriguing questions about parenthood and reproduction from a possibly unique perspective, elaborating intersections between a wide range of theories, beliefs and ideologies, from Edwardian feminist arguments for free mate choice, via interwar eugenics, to the implications of the discovery of DNA.