Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century by Molly Ladd-Taylor (review)

Interest in the history of eugenics is often motivated by a desire to understand and also shape contemporary policy. In Fixing the Poor, her thoughtful and richly detailed analysis of the Minnesota sterilization program, Molly Ladd-Taylor notes that much of the discourse around sterilization carries the implied lesson: “beware of experts, and beware of government power” (p. 1). Whatever the specific lesson (and there are others), histories that serve as cautionary tales function most effectively when they feature particularly repugnant characters and ideas.

Ladd-Taylor has traveled a fundamentally different path, stressing just how mundane eugenics was and how flexible its principles. In her work, eugenics’ broad and durable appeal becomes far more intelligible than in accounts that feature obvious villains, whose most basic dispositions and assumptions we cannot imagine sharing. The story told in Fixing the Poor, which includes several sympathetic characters and familiar and enduring assumptions about dependency and delinquency, is less easily employed for the standard sort of lesson-drawing.

The book’s central themes as well as its appreciation of the importance of sex and gender, attentiveness to the experiences of patients, and extension of the history of eugenics beyond World War II, will be familiar to those who already know Ladd-Taylor’s work. Broadly speaking, the book seeks to reorient thinking about sterilization policy and practice, situating it within the context of social-welfare concerns, institutions, and practices rather than concerns about genetic deterioration and the individuals and organizations that mobilized to prevent it.

Indeed, notwithstanding her book’s subtitle, Ladd-Taylor nearly severs the histories of sterilization and eugenics—at least if the latter is understood to entail a concern with heredity. Like Mark Largent, she argues that sterilization served multiple ends and should not be equated with eugenics.¹ But in her account of the Minnesota program, eugenics is pushed not just to the margins but almost out of the story; thus, she stresses that the state’s organized eugenics movement had virtually no impact on the program, and that those who designed and administered it had little concern with genetic harm. Sterilization was rather driven by a “mishmash of economic, administrative, and professional concerns” that mostly involved the desire to limit the state’s financial responsibility to the poor and to cope with sexual delinquency and single-motherhood (p. 135). Correlatively, geneticists, who had been the key actors in many earlier histories, are notable by their absence. The major players in the Minnesota story were bureaucrats involved in the state’s public welfare system, not scientists or doctors.

The disparity may be explained both by inter-state variation and differences in level of analysis. Ladd-Taylor stresses that Minnesota was an ordinary state. She notes that most prior studies focused on exceptional cases, such as California, where the largest number of sterilizations were performed. By implication, the Minnesota experience should be more generalizable. But it may be more accurate to say that the state was ordinary in some ways and exceptional in others. For instance, the Minnesota law was unusual in not referring to either heredity or social inadequacy, in the fact that it was one of only two states (the other being Vermont) where sterilization was ostensibly voluntary, and in its structure, whereby the state Board of Control (not institution superintendents) authorized sterilization. Thus, Minnesota may have been an outlier in respect to its key players’ indifference to genetics.

The level of analysis also matters. Works that focus on the passage of sterilization laws may well identify different actors and motivations than those that focus on the nitty-gritty of their implementation. It is possible that the state legislators, voters, and newspaper editorialists who endorsed such laws were largely aroused by fear of genetic deterioration even in a state such as Minnesota, where the administrators who developed and implemented policy were not.

That is why...