Taken from the Greek word eugene meaning “good in stock”, the term “eugenics” was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton (1822-1911). Today it is defined by the OED as “pertaining to or adapted to the production of fine offspring, esp. in the human race. We will try to explain what eugenics was in the context of its time and how it should be applied to humans. We will also attempt to identify who its supporters were and the many reasons why the doctrine of eugenics appealed to them. The problem of what to do with the urban poor had been a constant concern for the middle classes since the mid-19th century. Concerns about crime, vice and poverty broadened from the 1870s, and by the 1880s the East End of London represented a corruption that threatened the continued success of the British race. The harsh winter of 1885-1886 led the poor and unemployed to protest their living conditions in Trafalgar Square. Unemployed dock and construction workers rioted in Hyde Park. Tensions were high and the prosperous middle classes of the West End lived in real fear of the “mob” that would overwhelm them. Reproducing at a rapid rate, they risked overtaking the strongest members of society. A solution had to be found to the problem of the poor masses who threatened to encroach on the middle class. Galton, a mathematician, was a cousin of Charles Darwin, whose work on the Origin of Species led Galton to wonder whether man could be selectively bred in the same way as farmyard animals. . To attribute the laws of breeding to man, Galton sought proof that desirable characteristics are hereditary. Studying the most prominent and successful men of his day, he discovered that many were related and concluded that middle of paper ... eugenics doctrine was malleable and could be distorted to fit a variety of social contexts . activists. For Fabian socialists, eugenics offered the possibility of a bureaucratic utopia. The middle classes could use the eugenics movement to preserve their social status and rid society of its residue. For philanthropists, poverty and the diseases of the poor could be eliminated through the practice of eugenics, and for women's rights activists, the eugenics debate offered them the first opportunity to have a say in their reproductive rights and could argue that the movement was used by women to advance their position and gain additional rights that could never have been achieved through protest alone. Some historians believe that the eugenics debate was deployed within feminism in an attempt to seize and reshape the dominant socio-scientific discourse for subversive purposes...