Havelock Ellis, eugenicist

This article examines the contributions made towards eugenic thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Havelock Ellis (1859–1939). Ellis was a significant social reformer who worked on the problems of sexuality from a scientific–naturalist secular perspective. In the later phases of his work, after he had completed much of his writing on sexuality, Ellis concentrated on issues of feminism and eugenics—problems he thought were interlinked. In this paper, I integrate his ideas about these subjects, and consider the ways in which Ellis and other liberal social reformers created a ‘eugenic subject’ in order to frame their arguments about social problems.