Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century

How state welfare politics--not just concerns with "race improvement"--led to eugenic sterilization practices.

Honorable Mention, 2018 Outstanding Book Award, The Disability History AssociationShortlist, 2019 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association

Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. In Fixing the Poor, Molly Ladd-Taylor tells the story of these state-run eugenic sterilization programs. She focuses on one such program in Minnesota, where surgical sterilization was legally voluntary and administered within a progressive child welfare system.

Tracing Minnesota's eugenics program from its conceptual origins in the 1880s to its official end in the 1970s, Ladd-Taylor argues that state sterilization policies reflected a wider variety of worldviews and political agendas than previously understood. She describes how, after 1920, people endorsed sterilization and its alternative, institutionalization, as the best way to aid dependent children without helping the "undeserving" poor. She also sheds new light on how the policy gained acceptance and why coerced sterilizations persisted long after eugenics lost its prestige. In Ladd-Taylor's provocative study, eugenic sterilization appears less like a deliberate effort to improve the gene pool than a complicated but sadly familiar tale of troubled families, fiscal and administrative politics, and deep-felt cultural attitudes about disability, dependency, sexuality, and gender.

Drawing on institutional and medical records, court cases, newspapers, and professional journals, Ladd-Taylor reconstructs the tragic stories of the welfare-dependent, sexually delinquent, and disabled people who were labeled "feebleminded" and targeted for sterilization. She chronicles the routine operation of Minnesota's three-step policy of eugenic commitment, institutionalization, and sterilization in the 1920s and 1930s and shows how surgery became the "price of freedom" from a state institution. Combining innovative political analysis with a compelling social history of those caught up in Minnesota's welfare system, Fixing the Poor is a powerful reinterpretation of eugenic sterilization.

1126229852
Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century

How state welfare politics--not just concerns with "race improvement"--led to eugenic sterilization practices.

Honorable Mention, 2018 Outstanding Book Award, The Disability History AssociationShortlist, 2019 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association

Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. In Fixing the Poor, Molly Ladd-Taylor tells the story of these state-run eugenic sterilization programs. She focuses on one such program in Minnesota, where surgical sterilization was legally voluntary and administered within a progressive child welfare system.

Tracing Minnesota's eugenics program from its conceptual origins in the 1880s to its official end in the 1970s, Ladd-Taylor argues that state sterilization policies reflected a wider variety of worldviews and political agendas than previously understood. She describes how, after 1920, people endorsed sterilization and its alternative, institutionalization, as the best way to aid dependent children without helping the "undeserving" poor. She also sheds new light on how the policy gained acceptance and why coerced sterilizations persisted long after eugenics lost its prestige. In Ladd-Taylor's provocative study, eugenic sterilization appears less like a deliberate effort to improve the gene pool than a complicated but sadly familiar tale of troubled families, fiscal and administrative politics, and deep-felt cultural attitudes about disability, dependency, sexuality, and gender.

Drawing on institutional and medical records, court cases, newspapers, and professional journals, Ladd-Taylor reconstructs the tragic stories of the welfare-dependent, sexually delinquent, and disabled people who were labeled "feebleminded" and targeted for sterilization. She chronicles the routine operation of Minnesota's three-step policy of eugenic commitment, institutionalization, and sterilization in the 1920s and 1930s and shows how surgery became the "price of freedom" from a state institution. Combining innovative political analysis with a compelling social history of those caught up in Minnesota's welfare system, Fixing the Poor is a powerful reinterpretation of eugenic sterilization.

32.0 In Stock
Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century

Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century

by Molly Ladd-Taylor
Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century

Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century

by Molly Ladd-Taylor

Paperback

$32.00 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    In stock. Ships in 6-10 days.
  • PICK UP IN STORE

    Your local store may have stock of this item.

Related collections and offers


Overview

How state welfare politics--not just concerns with "race improvement"--led to eugenic sterilization practices.

Honorable Mention, 2018 Outstanding Book Award, The Disability History AssociationShortlist, 2019 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association

Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. In Fixing the Poor, Molly Ladd-Taylor tells the story of these state-run eugenic sterilization programs. She focuses on one such program in Minnesota, where surgical sterilization was legally voluntary and administered within a progressive child welfare system.

Tracing Minnesota's eugenics program from its conceptual origins in the 1880s to its official end in the 1970s, Ladd-Taylor argues that state sterilization policies reflected a wider variety of worldviews and political agendas than previously understood. She describes how, after 1920, people endorsed sterilization and its alternative, institutionalization, as the best way to aid dependent children without helping the "undeserving" poor. She also sheds new light on how the policy gained acceptance and why coerced sterilizations persisted long after eugenics lost its prestige. In Ladd-Taylor's provocative study, eugenic sterilization appears less like a deliberate effort to improve the gene pool than a complicated but sadly familiar tale of troubled families, fiscal and administrative politics, and deep-felt cultural attitudes about disability, dependency, sexuality, and gender.

Drawing on institutional and medical records, court cases, newspapers, and professional journals, Ladd-Taylor reconstructs the tragic stories of the welfare-dependent, sexually delinquent, and disabled people who were labeled "feebleminded" and targeted for sterilization. She chronicles the routine operation of Minnesota's three-step policy of eugenic commitment, institutionalization, and sterilization in the 1920s and 1930s and shows how surgery became the "price of freedom" from a state institution. Combining innovative political analysis with a compelling social history of those caught up in Minnesota's welfare system, Fixing the Poor is a powerful reinterpretation of eugenic sterilization.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781421437996
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date: 03/03/2020
Pages: 304
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.74(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Molly Ladd-Taylor is a professor of history at York University. She is the author of Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 and the coeditor of "Bad" Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Note on Terminology and Names
Introduction
1. The Feebleminded Menace and the Innocent Child
2. Two Roads to Sterilization
3. Who Was Feebleminded?
4. The Price of Freedom
5. Sterilization and Welfare in Depression and War
6. From Fixing the Poor to Fixing the System?
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Alexandra Minna Stern

Ladd-Taylor persuasively shows that the emergence and maintenance of sterilization was as entangled with state bureaucracy and welfare programs as it was with eugenic concerns about biological degeneracy. This book is a detailed and textured portrait of the politics and experiences of institutionalization and sterilization in twentieth-century Minnesota.

From the Publisher

Ladd-Taylor persuasively shows that the emergence and maintenance of sterilization was as entangled with state bureaucracy and welfare programs as it was with eugenic concerns about biological degeneracy. This book is a detailed and textured portrait of the politics and experiences of institutionalization and sterilization in twentieth-century Minnesota.
—Alexandra Minna Stern, University of Michigan, author of Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews