'Fill the Comfortable Cradles and Empty the Gutters

To ‘Fill the Comfortable Cradles and Empty the Gutters’: Maternalist Eugenics and Reproductive Inequalities in the United States Tonie Marie Gordon Youngstown, Ohio M.A., Sociology, University of Virginia B.A., Professional Writing and Editing, Youngstown State University A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Sociology University of Virginia May, 2015 To ‘Fill the Comfortable Cradles and Empty the Gutters’ 2 To ‘Fill the Comfortable Cradles and Empty the Gutters’: Maternalist Eugenics and Reproductive Inequalities in the United States Abstract After the cruelties of the Holocaust exposed the potential for scientific racism to devolve into genocide, the practice of eugenics became stigmatized in the Western world. In 1950, a global panel of scientists working with UNESCO, reported that racial hierarchies are not rooted in biological fact. Consequently, by the 1960s, a number of social scientists pronounced the end of eugenics and other forms of scientific racism. To the contrary, eugenic infringements on women’s reproduction including coerced birth control, forced sterilization, compulsory reproduction and the genetic manipulation of the reproductive process has continued in the United States since this time. Such infringements on women’s reproduction, have in the post-civil rights era, increasingly targeted black women. The interrelated paradoxes of the continuation and simultaneous racialization of eugenics leads to the following questions: What mechanisms have sustained eugenics from the dawn of the twentieth century to modern day? And, in the post-Civil Rights Era, how has eugenics come to increasingly target women of color? Most of the current multidisciplinary literature on eugenics and women’s reproduction and coupling or ‘maternalist politics’ documents eugenics without offering a theoretical framework that explains its continuance. Likewise, scholarship that takes up the relationship between eugenics and race examines eugenics as a consequence of racism without identifying its underlying processes. To more thoroughly access the mechanisms underlying maternalist eugenics, I have conducted a meta-analysis comparing the Age of Reform (1890-1940) and our contemporary Era of Neoliberalism (1980-2015). Comparing these periods has allowed for an analysis of the cultural dimension of maternalist eugenics within different configurations of the state-market relationship. Accordingly, I show how the politics of progressivism and reform as opposed to the politics of neoliberalism produced divergent reproductive inequities or as I refer to them, “reproductive dystopias”. A process I call “image-to-policy transmutation” in which complex cultural representations of “the other” in political and scientific discourse translates into policy, underlie the practice of eugenics in each period. By calling attention to image-to-policy transmutation in each period, I show how groups of women based on race, class and notions of disability become targeted for negative eugenics including coercive birth control measures and forced sterilization. Simultaneously, I show how other women in each period become subjected to positive eugenics or manipulation to produce multiple, genetically “fit” children. This dissertation attends to the diffusion of cultural understandings of difference within the realms of scientific discourse, national politics and the market. As such, this research contributes to cultural scholarship that focuses on inequality and boundary-making. This dissertation, which is inextricably tied to contemporary U.S. policy-making, also contributes to the literature inside and outside of academe on reproductive justice. To ‘Fill the Comfortable Cradles and Empty the Gutters’ 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Eugenics and Gender Critical Scholarship on Eugenics Maternalist Eugenics and the Economy Women, the State and Reproductive Inequalities: A Review of the Literature Theoretical Framework: A Feminist Approach to Culture and Economy Research Design Outline of Dissertation CHAPTER 2: THE SCIENTIFIC ORIGINS OF EUGENICS Eugenic Thought before Darwin Darwin, Social Darwinism and Eugenics Racism and Misogyny in Eugenic Science The Institutionalization of Eugenic Science in the United States Layers of Dissent: Challenges to Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture Debate, 1890-1940 Conclusion and Discussion CHAPTER 3: ELIMINATING THE ‘UNWANTED TYPES’: INSTITUTIONALIZED EUGENICS, RACIAL POLITICS AND REPRODUCTIVE INEQUALITY DURING THE AGE OF REFORM Eugenics during the Age of Reform ‘Three Generations of Imbeciles are Enough:’ Buck v. Bell and Poor Whites as Spectacle Linking Cultural Imagery and Institutional Realities: Eugenics and Tobacco Road Eugenics and the Color Line: The Submersion of the Racial “Other” and the Simultaneous Maintenance of White “Purity” Maternalist Welfare Eugenics and Women’s Movements during the Era of Progressives Giving Birth to Eugenic Fears: Eugenics and the Birth Control Movement in Compromise and Conflict Intersecting Inequalities: Black Women and Eugenics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Conclusion and Discussion To ‘Fill the Comfortable Cradles and Empty the Gutters’ 4 CHAPTER 4: ‘RAISING THE SPECTER OF EUGENICS’: NEOLIBERALISM AND THE EUGENIC CREED IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWNETY-FIRST CENTURIES Neoliberal Inequalities: The Not-So-Free Market and the Rhetoric of Colorblindness Race, Gender and Poverty in the Scientific Imagination Cultural Understandings of Difference in the Social Sciences: A Subtle Return to the Rhetoric of Eugenics The Social and Behavioral Sciences and Eugenics: The Reification of Racial Hierarchies in the IQ Debate and other Biosocial Explanations of Difference The Vilification of Black Motherhood in the American Consciousness Contemporary Eugenic Infringements on Black Women’s Reproduction A Reprogenetic Dystopia: The Continued Legacy of Genetics and Eugenics Conclusion and Discussion CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND REFLECTIONS ON RESISTING MATERNALIST EUGENICS Resisting the Logic of Neoliberalism Fighting Fire with Fire: Economic Policy for the Eradication of Eugenics Challenging Science: Discussion of the Scientific Epistemology of Eugenics and Suggestions for Future Academic Research Current Political Resistance and Suggestions for Future Public Policy Conclusion REFERENCES ADDENDUMS ADDENDUM I: Major Works on Eugenics, 1850-1940 ADDENDUM II: Eugenics in Government, Law & Policy, 1850-1940 ADDENDUM III: Major Events related to Eugenics, 1980-2015 To ‘Fill the Comfortable Cradles and Empty the Gutters’ 5 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Certainly, most Americans, when considering an alignment between racism and science– a system based on economic competition and scapegoating that goes so far as to impose harsh and life-altering judgments on racial, economic, and social “others”–envision a Hitler led Germany. Indeed, for many Americans, population control is fused to images of concentration camps, gas chambers and medical experiments conducted by Nazi Doctors and the Anti-Semitic propaganda that accompanied it.1 Dozens of popular films, books, documentaries and museums have seared these images into the American consciousness (Novick 2000; Mintz 2001). The unconscionable acts of the Nazi Holocaust, especially those atrocities committed against Jews throughout Europe in the early-Twentieth century, have become the archetypal image of population control and racist science. “Never again!” the rallying cry of the Jewish Defense League and an appeal to human rights that resonated with people the world over, is for most of us a reminder of the cruel possibilities of humanity and a charge to never allow the dehumanization of a population to reach such severe heights that their dignity and bodily integrity are obliterated. Due to the attention of China’s “eugenics law” in the U.S., some Americans contemplating eugenics might think of China, where population control is written into law and strictly enforced, making its presence an undeniable reality. In 1995, the People’s Republic of China passed a law requiring pre-marital medical checkups for married couples with permission to procreate, in order to ascertain whether one of the potential 1 The absence of eugenics within the American consciousness has been documented by Brave and Sylva (2007) as well as Burke and Castaneda (2007), who documented the surprise of attendees to museum exhibits and symposiums that highlight the history of eugenics in the United States. To ‘Fill the Comfortable Cradles and Empty the Gutters’ 6 parents has a hereditary condition, mental disorder or contagious disease (Dikötter 1998). If any such abnormality is found, than the intended parents are forced to abort the pregnancy and/or undergo sterilization (Gewitz 1994; Dikötter 1998). This legislation also requires parents to undergo routine medical examinations to ensure that the fetus is developing healthfully (Mao 1997). Furthermore, China’s “one child policy” coupled with the reverence and favoritism given to men over women in Chinese culture has resulted in large-scale abortions of female fetuses and the mass infanticide of baby girls (Chan et. al 2002; Handwerker 2002). Pregnant women who are not married are forced to undergo abortions (Dikötter 1998). The de-prioritization of baby girls and the complete suspension of women’s freedom to control their own reproductive lives has erupted in a tidal wave of outrage from feminist and other human rights groups who named

Load more