A slight detour on the 'Shaw supported eugenics" thing, with RADA students apparently calling for Shaw's name to be removed from the academy's theatre. It's true, yes, that Shaw was broadly supportive of the concept...

But if we look at the milieu he moved in, basically everyone was. Even Magnus Hirschfield, rightly praised now as a pioneer of queer rights, was quite actively in favour of eugenics

So much so that there was considerable debate between British and German delegates to the World League For Sexual Reform Congress about how *overtly* pro-eugenics the congress should be (the British wanted to water down the language a little bit).

The central planks of the Congress, likely drawn up by Hirschfeld (apols for misspelling in previous post) called for "Eugenics in the sense of Nietzsche’s words: ‘You shall not merely continue the race, but move it upwards!’"

This was watered down (probably by Dora Russell) to support for "Race betterment by the application of the knowledge of Eugenics." Still quite bad when we read it today.

The point is, this was a meeting of perhaps the most socially progressive people on the planet at the time, or at least people who would have perceived themselves to be. And eugenics was at the heart of their thinking.

It was, as they saw it, an emerging science full of social possibilities. It was a part of what they saw as liberatory politics of class, gender, sex and race.

So, if nothing else, it should teach us to imagine what will happen when some ideas we hold to be good and true are deemed to be completely wrong, and how we would like people to view us. Anyway, more on the World League for Sexual Reform Congress here http://littleatoms.com/australian-doctor-who-brought-sexual-revolution-london