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

Wendy Kline has added an important perspective to the growing literature on eugenics, especially in the United States. Building a Better Race addresses the issues of race and gender in the eugenics movement of the period 1910-50, and that movement's influence on the postwar generations up through the turn of the millennium. Kline portrays the development of genetics in terms of the new sexuality and morality of the early decades of the twentieth century, and ties these changes into the larger perspective of the perceived "degeneration" of society. Eugenics, as she sees it, gained its popularity by addressing both the problem of race (in its broad sense, as "human race") and the change in women's position within society, especially with regard to their role as reproductive agents and mothers. The solution to the prospect of improper motherhood was sterilization, so Kline concentrates her study on California, where the largest percentages of eugenical sterilizations in the United States took place (over half by 1935). She raises a number of interesting questions, and provides new information about institutions such as the Sonoma State Hospital and Paul Popenoe and Roswell Johnson's Human Betterment Foundation.

The first chapter, "Motherhood, Morality, and the Moron," charts the development of corporate capitalism, progressivism, the sexual revolution of the immediate pre- and post-World War I era (the "roaring twenties"), and the growing concern over "race suicide" (E. A. Ross's term popularized by Theodore Roosevelt) stemming from the unwillingness of many educated young women to take on the traditional roles of housewife and mother. Eugenics stood to correct these issues by identifying the "girl problem"—that is, women who, because of the shift in moral standards, were unfit to be good mothers and should be sterilized. This early emphasis on negative eugenics was seen as fulfilling the American Eugenics Society's dictum that "Eugenics stands against the forces which work for racial deterioration" (p. 30).

Sterilization was promoted by avoiding its older negative connotations of invasive surgery that "unsexed" the individual. Unearthing the testimonies of many families and patients who had actually sought sterilization for themselves or relatives, Kline poignantly illustrates the degree to which many women had internalized their own sense of defect and lack of ability to bring forth a "normal" child, or in many cases to care for it properly even if the child itself were not disabled. She helps to show that sterilization was not viewed as a universal instrument of oppression, as is so often stated, or at least implied, in existing histories of eugenical sterilization (including some of my own writing).

A later chapter deals with the effect of the depression of 1929-33 on the incidence of sterilization and on the eugenics movement as a whole. Kline points out that even though historians have claimed that the eugenics movement was on the decline by the early 1930s, the sterilization rate in California more than tripled in the period 1931-39, compared to 1920-29. She argues, however, that by the 1930s eugenics was taking a different approach, emphasizing "euthenics" (improvement of the environment) and placing more of its focus on individual rather than on group (racial or class) differences (what other historians have called "reform eugenics"). The shift also included an increased concern about the ability of certain women to be good mothers, whether or not they were "genetically" defective. As Kline shows, eugenics was becoming much more pluralistic by the 1930s, and sterilization could be promoted for a variety of social ends that did not require a genetic basis.

In an epilogue, the author discusses the continuation of the pluralistic 1930s eugenic outlook reflected in the current work of David Popenoe (son of Paul Popenoe of the Human Betterment Foundation) and his conservative Council on Families in America...