How the Us Government Shaped Citizenship During the 20Th
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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 The Reproduction Of Citizenship: How The U.s. Government Shaped Citizenship During The 20th Century By Regulating Fertility, Procreation, And Birth Across Generations Elspeth M. Wilson University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Wilson, Elspeth M., "The Reproduction Of Citizenship: How The U.s. Government Shaped Citizenship During The 20th Century By Regulating Fertility, Procreation, And Birth Across Generations" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2921. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2921 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2921 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Reproduction Of Citizenship: How The U.s. Government Shaped Citizenship During The 20th Century By Regulating Fertility, Procreation, And Birth Across Generations Abstract Who qualifies, with full status, as an American citizen? Like all modern nation-states, the United States erects and maintains various types of legal and geographic boundaries to demarcate citizens from noncitizens. The literature in political science tends to focus on the ways in which immigration law structures citizenship over time, but this is only half the story. As this dissertation demonstrates, governments also regulate the birth of citizens from one generation to the next. The concept of a ‘civic lineage regime’ is introduced as the domestic counterpart to the ‘immigration regime,’ when it comes to structuring civic membership in the United States (and other nations). To bring visibility to this deeply constitutive yet largely unexamined dimension of American political development, the project engages in a close analysis of U.S. Supreme Court cases targeting civic lineage during the twentieth century. Examining eugenic sterilization laws, birth control, abortion, and welfare reform, the dissertation maintains that the federal and state governments regulate the intimate lives of Americans for many of the same reasons governments seek to control immigration. In both realms, the state makes legal distinctions between who can and cannot become a member by coercively privileging certain visions of American identity over others. This often entrenches hierarchies of citizenship based on race, gender, ethnicity, class, disability, religion, and sexuality. These state-building policies, involving the regulation of reproduction and birth, have the ability to define and redefine the meaning and scope of U.S. citizenship across time by shaping the future “face” of the American polity. Finally, although many older inegalitarian conceptions of civic membership are now discredited, the dissertation concludes with evidence that the conflictual politics involved in constructing an American civic lineage regime continue today in the form of the rise of a new ‘neoliberal ideal of citizenship.’ Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Political Science First Advisor Rogers M. Smith Keywords American political development, citizenship, civic status, constitutional law, reproduction, right to privacy Subject Categories Political Science This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2921 THE REPRODUCTION OF CITIZENSHIP: HOW THE U.S. GOVERNMENT SHAPED CITIZENSHIP DURING THE 20th CENTURY BY REGULATING FERTILITY, PROCREATION, AND BIRTH ACROSS GENERATIONS Elspeth M. Wilson A DISSERTATION in Political Science Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Supervisor of Dissertation Signature ______________________ Rogers M. Smith Christopher H. Brown Distinguished Professor of Political Science; Associate Dean for Social Sciences Graduate Group Chairperson Signature ______________________ Matthew Levendusky, Associate Professor of Political Science Dissertation Committee Nancy Hirschmann, Professor of Political Science Anne Norton, Professor of Political Science Adolph Reed, Professor of Political Science THE REPRODUCTION OF CITIZENSHIP: HOW THE U.S. GOVERNMENT SHAPED CITIZENSHIP DURING THE 20th CENTURY BY REGULATING FERTILITY, PROCREATION, AND BIRTH ACROSS GENERATIONS COPYRIGHT 2017 Elspeth Megan Wilson This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ For my grandmother and my mother, Leta and Carol iii ABSTRACT THE REPRODUCTION OF CITIZENSHIP: HOW THE U.S. GOVERNMENT SHAPED CITIZENSHIP DURING THE 20th CENTURY BY REGULATING FERTILITY, PROCREATION, AND BIRTH ACROSS GENERATIONS Elspeth M. Wilson Rogers M. Smith Who qualifies, with full status, as an American citizen? Like all modern nation-states, the United States erects and maintains various types of legal and geographic boundaries to demarcate citizens from noncitizens. The literature in political science tends to focus on the ways in which immigration law structures citizenship over time, but this is only half the story. As this dissertation demonstrates, governments also regulate the birth of citizens from one generation to the next. The concept of a ‘civic lineage regime’ is introduced as the domestic counterpart to the ‘immigration regime,’ when it comes to structuring civic membership in the United States (and other nations). To bring visibility to this deeply constitutive yet largely unexamined dimension of American political development, the project engages in a close analysis of U.S. Supreme Court cases targeting civic lineage during the twentieth century. Examining eugenic sterilization laws, birth control, abortion, and welfare reform, the dissertation maintains that the federal and state governments regulate the intimate lives of Americans for many of the same reasons governments seek to control immigration. In both realms, the state makes legal distinctions between who can and cannot become a member by coercively privileging certain visions of American identity over others. This often entrenches hierarchies of citizenship based on race, gender, ethnicity, class, disability, religion, and sexuality. These state-building policies, involving the regulation of reproduction and birth, have the ability to define and redefine the meaning and scope of U.S. citizenship across time by shaping the future “face” of the American polity. Finally, although many older inegalitarian conceptions of civic membership are now discredited, the dissertation concludes with evidence that the conflictual politics involved in constructing an American civic lineage regime continue today in the form of the rise of a new ‘neoliberal ideal of citizenship.’ iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... IV CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: CITIZENS NEVER BORN ....................................................................... 32 CHAPTER 3: BIRTH CONTROL IN THE SHADE OF EUGENICS .......................... 114 CHAPTER 4: FROM GRISWOLD TO ROE ................................................................ 151 CHAPTER 5: PRIVATIZING ABORTION .................................................................. 215 CHAPTER 6: THE END OF WELFARE ...................................................................... 285 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION ....................................................................................... 379 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 392 v CHAPTER 1: Introduction All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside.— Citizenship Clause, Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution I am speaking of the average citizens, the average men and women who make up the nation…Into the woman's keeping is committed the destiny of the generations to come after us…the foundation of all national happiness and greatness.— Theodore Roosevelt, 1905 Perhaps our brightest hope for the future lies in the lessons of the past. As each new wave of immigration has reached America it has been faced with problems…[but] Somehow, the difficult adjustments are made and people get down to the tasks of earning a living, raising a family, living with their neighbors, and, in the process, building a nation. –John F. Kennedy, 1964 Children are, after all, our country’s most precious resource and our most important responsibility.—William J. Clinton, 1996 In May 2002, Virginia’s Governor Mark Warner issued a formal apology for the more than eight thousand Virginians who were forcibly sterilized from 1924 to 1979, under a state law that permitted such treatment of individuals deemed likely to produce “socially inadequate offspring.”1 The first in a series of governors to apologize for their state’s eugenics programs during the twentieth century, Warner’s act coincided with the 75th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Buck v. Bell, which upheld Virginia's 1 William Branigin, “Virginia Apologizes to the Victims of Sterilizations,”