Telegony: Previous Sexual Partners Influence a Woman's Offspring with New Partners

Telegony, the pseudo-biological doctrine that a woman's previous mates genetically influenced all her future offspring, appeared in Britannica's entries on heredity and reproduction, often presented as an established principle grounded in animal breeding. The theory supposedly explained unusual resemblances between children and their mother's past lovers. Telegony had superficial plausibility: selective breeding obviously influences offspring traits, so perhaps a woman's reproductive tract somehow retained genetic information from prior matings. The theory was applied earnestly to humans, with disturbing social implications: it justified restrictions on women's freedom and fed into eugenics pseudoscience. However, telegony was never true, and by the 1880s, controlled animal breeding experiments (notably with dogs and birds) demonstrated that offspring inherited traits only from their biological parents, not from previous sexual partners of the mother. Mendelian genetics, rediscovered in 1900, provided the mechanism: inheritance via discrete genes passed in reproduction, with no memory of prior matings. Britannica's entries shifted away from telegony, though vestiges of the belief persisted in folk medicine and questionable biology texts well into the 20th century.