Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (review)

Wendy Kline has written a provocative and original book on eugenics in the United States that takes gender and sexuality as central and illuminating concepts of historical analysis. She makes several compelling arguments that challenge the existing literature and add to our understanding of the versatility of eugenics during the twentieth century. Most importantly, Kline asserts that eugenics, although severely undermined by Nazi atrocities and seen by many commentators as a pseudoscience, did not disappear by the 1930s but instead flourished due to a heightened concern with female reproduction and the regulation of fertility. Following the lead of scholars such as Nancy Stepan and Molly Ladd-Taylor, Kline effectively explores many aspects of "ordinary eugenics" from the 1930s to the 1950s by highlighting women's experiences as well as constructs of femininity and, to a lesser extent, masculinity. In addition, Building a Better Race thoughtfully reinterprets the labels and diagnoses of feeblemindedness, moronity, and venereal infection through a gendered lens, connecting them, both in terms of discourse and practice, to the institutionalization, hypersexualization, and stigmatization of young, often white, working-class women in the first half of the twentieth century. Finally, Kline mobilizes her in-depth archival research of the Sonoma State Home to demonstrate that the enforcement of California's sterilization law was often linked to disciplining women's sexuality and to the emergence of the idealization of modern motherhood. Produced in part by eugenicists, the veneration of procreation and "fit" heterosexual unions and the pathologizing of putatively deviant sexuality and inappropriate gender types became staples of the baby boom ideologies of domesticity and nuclear familism that characterized the early cold war era.

Kline's overall argument is a corrective to much of the scholarship that has overlooked the longevity of eugenics or ignored the importance of gender and sexuality. Nonetheless, her assertions and conclusions are weakened by her inattention to key facets of the history of medicine and genetics, a superficial discussion of the role of "environment" in the reformulation of eugenics in the interwar period, and an uneven engagement with primary sources. For example, Kline seems surprisingly unaware of recently published work that examines the role of theories of heredity in anthropology, psychology, reproductive medicine (aside from sterilization), and race, all of which bear directly on her overarching argument about the shifting currents of eugenics from the 1890s to the 1950s. Reading the monographs and articles by Adele Clarke, Kathy Cooke, Stephen Selden, Jennifer Terry, Lily Kay, Leila Zenderland, and Sarah Tracy alongside Building a Better Race quickly raises questions about the ways in which developments in endocrinology and physiology, the standardization of intelligence and aptitude testing, the rising popularity of Freudian psychology, and debates in anthropological circles over the meaning and limits of "race" and "culture" disrupt the neatness of several of Kline's principal arguments. ¹ Particularly problematic are her claims that "race" had little to do with sterilization (a conclusion reached in large part due to her exclusive concentration on northern California's Sonoma State Home) and her facile deployment of "positive" versus "negative" eugenics, a dichotomy that has been destabilized by recent scholarship on the United States, Latin America, and European countries such as Italy and France.

Kline writes that "eugenicists popularized a doctrine of reproductive morality that countered selfish individualism with social responsibility" (98). She contends that creating robust families became the overriding mantra of a new generation of eugenicists, who, preoccupied by the disintegration of the family during the Great Depression, embraced the two-pronged approach of sterilization ("negative eugenics") and marriage counseling ("positive eugenics"). Fundamental to Kline's explanation of a revitalized eugenics is a more expansive view of the human constitution that incorporated "environment" and moral...