Interesting eugenics history site from Regents’ University in UK

December 9, 2008 — claudiamalacrida

This site might be of interest to those concerned with eugenic history. It’s done in an accessible and powerful format…make sure you turn off your pop-up blocker, and then enter the site through the left-hand side of this web entry page….

 

http://www.regent.edu/acad/schedu/uselesseaters/

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Posted in Collective memory, Documentary, Eugenics, History of eugenics, Memory. 10 Comments »

10 Responses to “Interesting eugenics history site from Regents’ University in UK”

  1. Spirit of the Time Says:
    December 9, 2008 at 12:55 am

    That’s quite the site; thanks for linking up to it, Claudia! One bit that will be of interest is the final section, on the contemporary relevance of eugenic history to disability.

  2. hymes Says:
    December 9, 2008 at 6:17 am

    One minor criticism, Carrie Buck was not intellectually disabled at all, she was raped by the nephew of the people who raised her and became pregnant and was sent to the Epileptic Colony–still in Virginia and under investigation by the DOJ–as the Central Virginia Training Center. She was sterilized to protect the reputation of the family that raised her. Her lawyer knew about it and did not present a defense–but then they don’t nowadays in Virginia either when folks are given hearings for involuntary “treatment”.

  3. hymes Says:
    December 9, 2008 at 6:20 pm

    documentation of my above comment: A new book by legal historian Paul Lombardo explores, in depth, the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously declared “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” This was the case that legalized involuntary sterilization of the “feeble-minded” and gave great credibility to the American eugenics movement.

    Lombardo details not only the needless cruelty of Holmes’ statement, but also it’s utter inaccuracy. As described by USA Today science columnist Dan Vergano:

    The three generations in the case, Carrie Buck, her mother, Emma, and daughter, Vivian, it turns out weren’t imbeciles; Carrie was an average student and Vivian, taken from her mother and placed in the home of the family whose nephew had fathered her, made the honor role once in her short life.
    “Buck earns a place in the legal hall of shame not only because Holmes’ opinion was unnecessarily callous but also because it was based on deceit and betrayal,” writes legal historian Paul Lombardo of Georgia State University in Atlanta, in his just-released book, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Scientists and lawyers, including Carrie Buck’s defense attorney, conspired against her, Lombardo finds in old records.

    The inaccuracy wasn’t an accident. Carrie Buck was used and betrayed at every turn:

    In reality, Buck was at the [Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded] because she had been raped and impregnated by the nephew of her foster family the year before. The family sent her to the colony, where her mother resided, to escape scandal. [Physician superintendent of the colony, Albert] Priddy “quickly began collecting information to demonstrate the hereditary defects he was certain linked Emma and Carrie,” writes Lombardo.

  4. claudiamalacrida Says:
    December 9, 2008 at 6:49 pm

    My own research is on the eugenics movement in Alberta, Canada during the last century. Here, too, considerable latitude was used in defining/categorizing who was ‘mentally defective’ (not my terminology, but history’s), so that many people who were ‘normal’ found themselves both institutionalized and eugenicized. Often, these categorizations fell along lines of race, gender, immigration status, and poverty; in Alberta, women, First Nation and Metis people, and Eastern Europeans were disproportionately among the ranks of those sterilized. Thus, and seemingly as typically occurs, marginalized people were (and are) more likely to fall under the net of social policies to limit reproduction, citizenship and freedom. The connections between sloppy science and opportunistic politics/policies are a recurring theme in the history of social control of the body.

    That being said, however, I also am careful to caution against a response to these occurrences that can be misconstrued as reading only that ‘they weren’t even disabled’. The problem with such arguments is that, while it does highlihgt the politics and problems of process attached to eugenic ideas, there is also a risk that one might think that mis-identity, rather than the control of difference is the real cuprit. I often hear such things from my students, who are horrified to hear that ‘perfectly normal’ people got caught in the net of eugenics policy, and the students’ responses sometimes occur to the detriment of understanding the horror of the situation for ALL people targeted by these actions. Of course, in my classes, and in my current writing and thinking about this, I am struggling to convey an understanding that while there were indeed terrible mistakes or specific abuses of these policies, the main point remains that attempting to control difference or contain undersireable traits of any kind is, at its core, a problematic social project.

    Does Lombardo unpack these ideas in his analysis?
    Thanks,
    Claudia

  5. hymes Says:
    December 10, 2008 at 3:13 am

    I must confess I just have the excerpt but I have his book on my holiday wish list and have hopes of getting it. So I don’t know. I would bet that he does. He used to be at UVA and he was instrumental in getting the official statement of regret from the state of Virginia for eugenics against people with disabilities in this state along with Keith Kessler and others.

    I agree that pointing out that the original case was someone without a disability is problematic, I had just learned this fact so was eager to share but yes, that is not the real issue at hand.

  6. hymes Says:
    December 10, 2008 at 3:37 am

    I apologize, I just noticed that the source of my quotation in my second comment did not come through even though I copied it and thought it would paste through with the rest. I got it from The Gimp Parage: http://thegimpparade.blogspot.com/2008/11/new-book-on-buck-v-bell.html

  7. manypetunias Says:
    December 11, 2008 at 6:45 pm

    I’ve been looking into how “problematic” reproduction was managed in Alberta in the last century, and have come across some of the files from the Beulah Home (for unmarried mothers) in Edmonton in the early 20th cent. They referred a few repeat clients to the Sterilization Committee, and the comments attached to these clients suggests a circular definition of “feeble-minded” – a woman (or girl) who gets pregnant out of wedlock more than once is feeble-minded because only a feeble-minded woman would fail to learn her lesson and get herself knocked up/be taken advantage of more than once. These repeat clients were understood differently from the naive and innocent “child-mothers” who had made terrible mistakes, which was the way most of the Beulah Home clients were construed in the surviving documents. At the risk of playing devil’s advocate, I do understand the position the Beulah Home people were in with some of the repeat clients, esp. quite young women who had three or more unplanned pregnancies and were obviously being victimized at home or elsewhere. Beulah Home had no way of offering any meaningful help to these women; the only thing they could offer was a trip to the Sterilization Committee as a weak form of damage control. No information as to whether these clients were actually sterilized (although I assume they were) or whether the sterilization happened without their consent.

  8. claudiamalacrida Says:
    December 16, 2008 at 10:01 pm

    Thanks for this comment – it stirred some things up for me, both personally and as a researcher. In terms of “..a weak form of damage control”, I realize that people and systems operate within their historical and political constraints, but still I do feel it is reasonable to stand judgment on these actions and on the actors who performed them. Sterilizing young ‘wayward’ women rather than protecting them, educating them or serving their need for reproductive control seems more than just a mistake in judgment or the best solution to a bad problem. Making victims of abuse sterile doesn’t stop the abuse, it just makes it invisible, and removes its outcomes from the public purse. I suspect that in Michener Center, sterilization occurred for at least some long-term residents because it saved a few staff and ‘higher-grade’ (not my term, but the insitutional lingo) residents from getting caught as sexual predators.

    I’m guessing the records at Beulah indicate some compassion on the part of administrators and social workers whilst making these determinations about these ‘troubled’ young women. I’ve interviewed ex-workers at Michener, and read documents in the archives written by them, and they often indicate fondness or at least a sense of high responsibility toward their charges and a seemingly compassionate view about their care. That being said, when I’ve spoken with survivors, their memories seem quite different, and they rarely (there are exceptions, I know) have maintained anything like a relationship to the institution or its workers once they got outside the doors. In other words, there are separate realities going on here – and this is probably why subaltern studies are necessary!

    The concept of following the path of least harm by sterilizing or insitutionalizing in these situations brings to mind my dear mother’s (seemingly constant) admonition that the road to hell is pave with good intentions.

  9. beulahbaby Says:
    November 25, 2009 at 10:10 pm

    I am very interested in the comments regarding Beulah Home in Alberta and would love to hear more about the location of records as I am starting a group for people adopted from there. I have to say that I was quite surprised to see these comments as the information I have been able to obtain so far would indicate that the staff were much more considerate of the birth mothers than this would indicate.

  10. beulahbaby2 Says:
    November 28, 2009 at 3:52 pm

    I am also interested in the comments about the Beulah Home, I was born there, my mother had a daughter before me lost to adoption, not born in the home, and a son after me, lost to adoption, not born in the home. She was 24 when she had me. I wish I could find someone who would have been in the home at the same time she was, Jan 1955, so I could find out how she may have been treated, how all of the mothers were treated, and if she looked after me for the 16 days before I was placed with my adoptive family. My mother remained in the home for an additional 2 days after I left.


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