UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Edith Summers Kelley's novel Weeds was published in 1923 by Harcourt, Brace. Despite receiving critical praise, the novel was not a commercial success, and was not reprinted until it was “rediscovered” by Michael J. Bruccoli in 1972.1 Weeds is the story of a woman coming of age in a tenant farming community in Kentucky. The novel contains some of the most graphic depictions of both childbirth and of a woman's attempt to induce a miscarriage. Interestingly, the childbirth scene was cut from the original edition by Harcourt, Brace, while the detailed description of the protagonist's attempts to abort a pregnancy were allowed to stand. Summers composed the novel after her and her husband's unsuccessful attempt at tobacco farming in rural Kentucky.2 Kelley depicts the debilitating labor of farming tobacco, and the precarious living to be had from its sale, which is subject to shifting market prices, the seemingly inevitable extremes of rain and draught, illness, and other forces that are beyond the farmers' control. The tension between the outer (environmental) and inner (biology) conditions that determine the fate of the characters places the novel in the tradition of American literary naturalism. In this paper, I will attempt to disentangle the relationship between environment, gender, and biology that is at the core of the work's signifying economy. Kelley focuses in particular on the labor of the women in the community, who work in the home and in the fields, and whose bodies become increasingly exhausted by both physical labor and repeated childbirth. In Weeds, Kelley centers the relationship between reproduction and degeneration around the disabling effects of physical labor and repeated childbirth on a women's bodies. I will read this in the context of both eugenic discourses that emphasized improving white racial stock by controlling who reproduces, and activism by early feminists such as Margaret Sanger who advocated for the availability of birth control as a means to ensure the health of women. 1 Charlotte Margolis Goodman, “Afterword,” Weeds. New York: The Feminist Press, 1982. 2 Ibid.