Corporal Rhetoric: Regulating Reproduction in the Progressive Era

Examines public discourse from the Progressive Era over the state’s right to regulate women’s bodies and their reproduction

When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes determined in 1927 that sterilization was a legitimate means of safeguarding the nation’s health, he was asserting the state’s right to regulate the production of the national body. His opinion represented a culmination of arguments about reproduction and immigration that had been circulating for years but that intensified during the...