““Poor breeders were also slackers in a demographic war at home. Yankees were being outbred by fecund ethnics; they were committing “race suicide.” Families of “better stock” should raise at least six children. Birth-dodgers should be made “the object of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people.” Roosevelt firmly believed that the altruistic female world of home and family was an essential counterweight to the competitive, selfish male world of business and politics. “The whole fabric of society rests upon the home,” as he put it. If women abandoned their roles as moral custodians, they might bring down not just a class, or an empire, but civilization itself.””
