Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States

Notes

157 introduction — in the name of progress 1. For histories of coerced sterilization in the United States and of the American eugenics movement, see Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963); Donald Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968); Kenneth Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); Garland Allen,“Genetics, Eugenics and Class Struggle,”Genetics 79 (1975): 29–45; Garland Allen, “Genetics, Eugenics and Society: Internalists and Externalists in Contemporary History of Science,” Social Studies of Science 6 (1976): 105–122; Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); Paul A. Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia: Aubrey Strode and the Case of Buck v. Bell”(Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1982); Paul A. Lombardo, “Involuntary Sterilization in Virginia: From Buck v. Bell to Poe v. Lynchburg,” Developments in Mental Health Law 3 (1983): 17–21; Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985); Paul A. Lombardo, “Three Generations, No Imbeciles: New Light on Buck v. Bell,” N.Y.U. Law Review 60 (1985): 30–62; Garland Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910–1940: An Essay in Institutional History,” Osiris 2 (1986): 225–264; Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 1990); Philip Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Diane Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995); Marouf Arif Hasian, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Martin Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999); Nancy Gallagher, Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999); Philip J. Pauly, Biologists and the Promise of American Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: History of a Bad Idea (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Notes Notes.qxd 6/20/07 10:21 AM Page 157 Press, 2001); Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Christina Cogdale, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Harry Bruinius, Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and American’s Quest for Racial Purity (New York: Knopf, 2006). 2. Richard Lynn, Eugenics: A Reassessment (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001); Nicholas Agar, Liberal Eugenics: In Defense of Human Enhancement (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); John Glad, Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-first Century (Schuylkill Haven, Pa.: Hermitage, 2006). 3. Harry Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (Chicago: Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922), 446. 4. My discussion of the use of particular terminology was significantly influenced by a similar discussion in the preface of Jesse F. Ballenger, Self, Senility, and Alzheimer’s Disease in Modern America: A History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), xiii–xiv. 5. C. Sengoopta, “‘Dr Steinach Coming to Make Old Young!’: Sex Glands, Vasectomy and the Quest for Rejuvenation in the Roaring Twenties,” Endeavor 27 (2003): 122–126. 6. For an exploration of the notion of coercion as it relates to sterilization, see Schoen, Choice and Coercion. 7. I refer here to the title of Daniel Kevles’s book on the subject, In the Name of...