Lecture 18 - Eugenics Flashcards
Eugenics means
well-born (coined 1883)
Goal of Eugenics:
to improve the biological quality of the human race.
Methods of Eugenics:
involved controlling reproduction of
- Negative eugenics: unfit
- Positive eugenics: fit
Eugenics was popular in
1900-1945 and organized in 30+ countries
Key components of Eugenics
- scientific knowledge claims
- beliefs about human difference
- social and medical practices aiming to eliminate “social problem groups”
typical attitudes of disability
Something that needs to be “fixed”; inferior
the field of disability studies:
promotes a new framework for understanding what disability is and the lives of people with disabilities.
disability is defined as
restricted participation caused by social barriers.
- people with impairments are disabled by society.
- oppressed by architectural barriers, policies, stereotypes (weak, burden, dangerous…), attitudes of pity and fear.
Eugenicists put forward a
wide variety of proposals for “race betterment” in the name of “the public good.,
Core components of Eugenics that perpetuated negative views of disability:
1) biological (genetic) cause of social problems
2) some people are a burden (dependent) on society/state
- Resulted in: ideas and practices that labeled many kinds of people unfit for citizenship (and unfit to be born).
“Public good” of Eugenics
- Relieve: the economic burden of disability
- Charles Davenport, founder of Eugenics Record Office, 1910: “It is a reproach to our intelligence that we as a people should have to support about half a million insane, feebleminded, epileptic, blind and deaf; 80,000 prisoners and 100,000 paupers at a cost of over 100 million dollars per year”
Eugenics target
- People with: disabilities
- Ex: Pedigree of “feebleminded” family
“Feeblemindedness”
Believed to be the cause of: other “social ills”: crime, poverty, prostitution…
History of state institutions for disabled people
- 19th century goal: of treating “lunatics” and training “idiots” gave way
- By 1900: to long-term confinement in state institutions. Ex: School for Idiotic Children: “brutes in the human shape, but without the light of human reason”
- 1886 Washington School for Defective Youth
- 1906 State School for the Deaf and Blind
- 1906 State Institution for Feebleminded (1933 Custodial School)
Social construction of disability: Who was “feebleminded”?
- 1905: IQ Test invented
- 1910s: US psychologists say that intelligence is hereditary and unchangeable.
- “Menace” to society
- By 1900: in the US, there were 328 institutions housing 200,000 people labeled mentally ill or mentally deficient.
Social construction of disability: Intelligence testing 1918
- Example from: the IQ tests in US Army
- For recruits: who were non-English speaking or illiterate
- “ Complete the picture”
- 40% found to be feebleminded
- Test questions, Army Alpha: People hear with their Eyes/ears/nose/mouth
Defining disability in terms of:
race and ethnicity
1924 Immigration Restriction Act:
- mental testing and “expert” testimony to Congress legitimized the law.
- set quotas for Eastern and Southern European immigrants allowed into the US.
Model law for compulsory sterilization, 1922
- An act to prevent: the procreation of persons socially inadequate from defective inheritance.
- Persons Subject: All persons in the State who, because of degenerate or defective hereditary qualities are potential parents of socially inadequate offspring.
- Socially inadequate people: “Feebleminded, insane, criminalistics, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, deformed, orphans, ne’er do-wells, homeless, tramps, and paupers”
Negative eugenics
- By 1930s, 30 states had: compulsory sterilization laws
Social construction of disability: Supreme Court upholds forced sterilization
- For: social control and “public health”
- 1927 Buck vs Bell
- – “three generations of imbeciles are enough”
- – “for the protection and health of the state,” like compulsory vaccination.
- Story: Carrie Buck was a poor, white teen who was raped, had a child out of wedlock, was labeled feebleminded.
“Deaf eugenics”: Alexander Graham Bell
1883 paper to National Academy of Science was: a focal point in the early history of the eugenics movement:
- “On the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race.”
- List of “socially unfit”: people with deafness as well as “undesirable ethnic elements”
- Investigated: the heritability of deafness (looked at surnames and deaf relatives in institutional records) .
- “Deaf-mutes marry deaf-mutes” because: they are segregated by using ASL.
- “Great calamity”: of the births of deaf children.
- Educating deaf children: costs the public $1 million per year.
- Policy proposal: prevent inter-marriage of Deaf people.
Bell’s defense of oralism
- Comparison with assimilating immigrants
- “english alone should be used as as the means of communication and instruction, at least in public schools”
- – Use of ASL: “is contrary to the spirit and practice of American Institutions (as foreign immigrants have found out).”
- Bell’s goal: halt the growth of Deaf culture, in order to “assimilate” Deaf people into the mainstream.
- Preferred that Deaf people should choose oralism as best way to prevent deaf marriages and offspring.
- Because: more human that forced sterilization as for disabled people.
Deaf middle-class men’s resistance to compulsory eugenics
1) scientific evidence:
- most Deaf children are born to non-deaf parents and 90% of Deaf-Deaf marriages do not produce Deaf children.
2) individual rights:
- society’s interest in avoiding defective births should not outweigh the right of citizens to make private reproductive choices.
3) “normal” domestic lives:
- Deaf people are no different in their desire for love, marriage, and children.
Deaf support for “voluntary eugenics”
An American Deaf leader:
- it is “self-evident” that births of Deaf children “should be avoided”
- preferably, Deaf people should voluntarily practice personal eugenics in selecting marriage partners.
Murray’s conclusion:
- “With their rights potentially at stake, Deaf leaders sought a middle ground, refusing to cede individual rights (to marry), yet rejecting any attempt to publicly defend the right to have Deaf children”
Most extreme: eugenics in Nazi Germany
1993: forced sterilization law
- applied to 400,000 “hereditary defectives”
- 1939: T4 killing programs (so-called “euthanasia” or “mercy death”)
- more than 200,000 institutionalized adults and children with disabilities.
- economic logic: “lives not worth living” and “useless eaters”
1941: Final Solution
- Gas chambers from Action T4 were moved to concentration camps to murder 6 million Jewish people and other groups.
“Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring”
- Date: July 14, 1993
- Doctors required to: to register all “defective” births in Germany
- Forced sterilization for: hereditary feebleminded, mentally ill, epileptic, alcoholic, blind, deaf, etc.
- Deaf people were 4% of sterilizations = 16,000
- In 1932, there were a total of 40,000 Deaf people in Germany
- Commonly, deafness was associated with “idiocy”
Deaf community responses to Nazi policies
Some superintendents of German deaf schools: collaborated with Nazis to implement sterilization law.
- Informed Genetic Health Court about: individual deaf students
- Gathered: family histories of deafness
- Encouraged: parents to consent to children’s surgeries.
Some Deaf school leaders: resisted the Nazis
- Refused to: to turn in deaf and/or Jewish students
To avoid persecution: some schools and deaf clubs publicized themselves as “ideal Germans” (i.e. not Jewish, not physically or mentally unfit)
Murder of Deaf people in Nazi Germany
- July 26, 1941 letter to sister of deaf teenager: Had already been sterilized and Was taken from deaf school to the killing center
- First letter: “By order of the Reich Defense Commissioner [she] was transferred to another institution whose name and address are not known to me. The receiving institution will send you a letter. I would ask you to abstain from further inquiries until this notice is received”
- 5 weeks later: “We inform you with regret that your sister unexpectedly died as a consequence of pulmonary tuberculosis… [local police] ordered the immediate cremation of the remains and the disinfection of belongings”
Conclusions: where were “disability” and “Deaf” in the history of eugenics?
Some shared experiences:
- marriage restriction
- institutionalization
- sterilization
Deaf eugenics:
- persecution: oralism, violate reproductive rights, murder.
- negotiated strategies of resistance within discriminatory societies.
Constructions of the category “disability”:
- intersections with class, race, gender categories. “Disability” was deployed based on ideology.
