Sybil Neville-Rolfe


Sybil Neville-Rolfe, OBE was a social hygienist and founder of the Eugenics Society, and a leading figure in the National Council for Combating Venereal Disease. She has been described as a feminist eugenicist.

Career

She and Francis Galton founded the Eugenics Education Society in London in 1907, with Galton serving as its first honorary president. She took the role of honorary secretary upon the Society's founding until 1920. The Eugenics Education Society believed that social class and poverty were directly linked to one's genetics and their ideals were closely linked to the Committee of the Moral Education League. She also founded the Imperial Society for Promoting Sex Education and was the Deputy Chair of the Child Welfare Council. Therefore, the Society aimed to reduce poverty in England through reducing the birth rate of the lowest classes and those of low intelligence. In 1912, she was the driving force behind the Society's organisation of the first International Eugenics Congress in South Kensington. After 1920 she acted as the Society Council's vice-president and later was elected to serve on the consultative council, a position that she held until her death in 1955.
Neville-Rolfe implemented the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. She was also one of the establishing members of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child in 1918, where she worked on reforming poor-law institutions and hostels for unmarried mothers and their children. She was also a leading figure in the National Council for Combating Venereal Disease which was founded in 1914. Upon the NCCVD's founding she held the position of Honorary Secretary. Later in the NCCVD's life she held the position of secretary-general. The NCCVD changed its name to the British Social Hygiene Council in 1926, and Neville-Rolfe remained working for them until her retirement in 1944.

Awards

She was awarded an OBE for her work during the First World War with the War Savings Committee in the Treasury. In 1941, she became both the first woman and the first non-American to receive the Snow Medal from the American Social Hygiene Association, for distinguished services to humanity.

Beliefs

Her beliefs in eugenics and prostitution developed when she trained and worked as a rescue worker in a shelter for troubled girls. She was determined to study these issues in efforts to eliminate prostitution and venereal disease. She stopped working at the shelter because she felt the staff were not well educated on physiology and reproduction. She then left to find work elsewhere in Bethnal Green, London, where even there, she thought this staff of rescue workers was not competent or knowledgeable about contraception. Because of this, she insisted they educate themselves further in the area of biological sciences. She also believe single mothers were not to blame as they had been manipulated and enticed by men. Because of this, she was determined to help educate these women on sex and contraception in order to prevent these mistakes from happening in the future.

Eugenics

Sybil Neville-Rolfe published an article in 1917 titled "The Eugenic Principle in Social Reconstruction" which detailed her beliefs regarding eugenics. She believed that certain people were genetically superior to other people within a society, and that these people who were genetically superior to their peers and born into the lower classes would rise up to attain a higher quality of life. They would do so because they were inherently more productive and useful people within society, which would be proven by the fact that they were able to achieve financial independence. Conversely, she felt that children born into families of people who had proven themselves to be of a higher genetic status than their peers could also be of a lower genetic worth than their parents and would naturally sink in status through the course of their life, and also never achieve the financial independence that is used in this system to prove one's genetic worth. She called this process eugenic selection.
Throughout her life she made several assertions as to how eugenics could be implemented into the governing bodies and institutions in Britain to preserve the Anglo-Saxon race. She felt that changes needed to be made at both a social and government level to encourage people with better genetics to marry and have children together early in life while also discouraging people who could not attain financial independence, contracted a venereal disease, or were otherwise mentally deficient from having children. To this end she suggested several changes to social norms and the policies of the government, including:
Throughout her life Sybil Neville-Rolfe took a stance against the practice of prostitution and suggested many ways in which this problem could be dealt with, especially within the article she published in 1918 titled "The Changing Moral Standard: Reprinted from The Nineteenth Century and After." Instead of blaming the prostitute for the profession that she ended up in, Neville-Rolfe blames the degeneration of morals and the perpetuation of the profession by three different interest groups associated with the practice; The prostitutes themselves who supply the profession, those that purchase and demand their services, and the middle-men who encourage this practice for their own material gain. Each of these groups have their own distinct subgroups.

Supply

  1. The feeble-minded, who should have been cared for through provisions within the government that existed in this era to help prevent them from needing to turn to prostitution to support themselves.
  2. The morally defective, who she felt should have been dealt with through amending the Mental Deficiency Act
  3. Women charged and convicted of a crime who had served her sentence but, because of her conviction, finds it impossible to return to her profession or be hired into another respectable profession after serving her sentence.
  4. Unmarried mothers, who were often disowned by their families and fired from their jobs because of their status of unwed motherhood. The social machinations of the era often prevented these women from being able to find respectable work and many unwed mothers were forced to turn to prostitution to pay for the care of themselves and their child.
  5. Normal girls led astray by wanting to have a good time and the relaxation of moral codes that condemn premarital sex.

    Demand

  6. Men who only turn to prostitution one or a few times before marriage, then marry and live a normal life.
  7. Men who seek prostitutes and extra-marital sex after marriage
  8. Men who are considered temperamentally unstable and seek out prostitutes habitually throughout the course of their lives.

    Middle-men

  9. The brothel-keeper, which includes women who owned and ran brothels as well as pimps, who made money through bringing together supply with demand.
  10. The property owner, who could make more money by renting their property to people who intended to use it for amoral and illegal practices.
  11. The liquor and amusement purveyor.
Sybil Neville-Rolfe felt that increasingly lax morals of the era were contributing to the problem of prostitution and felt that girls who left the home to take industrial jobs and attain independence were at a particular risk of becoming prostitutes themselves, who would fall under the category of normal girls who were led astray. She felt that without home influences that these girls were liable to fall to the temptation of premarital sex, as there was little provision for recreational activities for women outside of working. This would cause women to go out seeking amusements and, without considering ideas of social responsibility, they would engage in immoral behaviour. To combat this practice she suggested many changes to policy and current legislation, as well as the implementation of new legislation. These ideas included:
She was born Sybil Katherine Burney in Queen's House, Royal Naval College on June 22, 1885. She was the daughter of Admiral Sir Cecil Burney and Lucinda Marion Burnett. Her brother was Dennistoun Burney, a marine, aeronautical engineer, and Conservative MP. As a child, she often lodged in different naval quarters, but these moves were always temporary. She was home-schooled by French and English women who were privately hired governesses. She knew multiple languages as she traveled to France and Germany as a teenager, however even this knowledge did not compare to her yearning for a University education.
Her first husband was Lieutenant Arthur Corry Gotto, whom she married on December 29, 1905, however this marriage was extremely brief due to his death in a coaling accident in September, 1906. Her second marriage was to Commander Clive Neville-Rolfe on March 24, 1917.