Module 2 Flashcards
W.E.B DuBois, The souls of Black Folk
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line”
Abraham Lincon and Race
-Like Thomas Jefferson, ultimately advocated for abolition on the basis of universal equality bu t feared there was no actual path forward for racial equality in the US
-Pursued arrangements for voluntary colonization programs in which African Americans could relocate
-This was in the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation
“The Destiny of Colored Americans” (1849)
-Fredrick Douglass
We repeat…that we are here; and that is our country; and the question for the philosophers and statesmen of the land ought to be, “What principles should dictate the policy of the action towards us?” We shall neither die out, nor be driven out; but shall go on with this
people, either as a testimony against them, or as evidence in their favor throughout their generations.
Reconstruction (1863-1877)
-Amendment XIII (1865)
~Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Amendment XIV (1866)
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Amendment XV (1870)
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Jim Crow Era (1877-1970s?)
-Establishment of the Ku Klux Klan (1865)
-Compromise of 1877: effectively “ended” the Reconstruction Era, giving black Americans the right to vote.
-Literacy Tests, Bans on Interracial Relationships
-Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.”
-Segregation at State Level (1865–1960s) and Federal Level (1896–1954)
-Rise of lynchings across the US, especially the South (1880–1940s)
-Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
Voting Rights:
-The Supreme Court
-Merrill v. Milligan: Alabama’s redrawn congressional
districts has only one Black-majority district out of seven, in a state that is more than a quarter Black.
-Moore v. Harper involves congressional-district
gerrymandered maps for North Carolina. Supreme Court agreed to consider the “independent state legislature” theory, which holds that the power the Constitution grants state legislatures to organize elections cannot be limited by a state’s judiciary or constitution.
-A broad decision in the case could make it far easier for state legislatures to engage in gerrymandering or voter suppression, or to intervene even more directly in the electoral process.
Atlanta Compromise Speech
-September 18, 1895
-Washington selected to give a speech to open the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia.
-First speech given by an African American to a racially mixed audience in the South
The Atlanta Compromise
“There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen. Effort or means so invested will pay a thousand per cent interest. These efforts will be twice blessed–“blessing him that gives and him that takes.”
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)
-1st African American to earn a PhD from Harvard University (1895)
-Co-founder of Niagara Movement, opposed to Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise”
-Co-founded NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)
-Editor of The Crisis, journal devoted to “the danger of race prejudice”
Key Term
-Double-Consciousness
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903
Key Term
-The Veil
-Du Bois argues that the Veil prevents white people from seeing black people as Americans, and from treating them as fully human.
-Psychological manifestation of the color line.
-Compels white people to structure society according to a racist logic—to build and police along the color line. Prevents black people from seeing themselves as they really are, outside of the negative vision of blackness created by racism.
Key Terms
-W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—
a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s
soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
How Should African-Americans Proceed?
Washington: “We shall not agitate for political or social equality. Living separately, yet working together, both races will determine the future of our beloved South.”
Niagara: “We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults. Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty,
and toward this goal the Niagara Movement has started and asks the cooperation of all men of all races.”
Ida B. Wells (1863-1931)
-In 1884, filed a lawsuit against a train car company in
Memphis for being thrown off a first-class train, despite having a ticket.
-After the lynching of one of her friends, turned her attention to white mob violence.
-Published her findings in a series of fiery editorials in the newspaper she co-owned and edited, The Memphis Free Speech
-Forced to move to Chicago for her anti-lynching campaign.
Lynchings
-White mobs murdered roughly 5,000 African Americans between the 1880s and 1950s.
At the height of Southern lynching, in the last years of the 19th century, Southerners lynched two to three African Americans every week.
-Burnham and political scientist Melissa Nobles created a database of what Burnham calls a “forgotten history of racially motivated homicides” in the American South during the Jim Crow era.
-Many of the victims in this book were only one or two
generations removed from slavery; a number of them were missing death certificates or were buried in graves unknown. Some of the white people who killed them lived long lives; few were held to account.
Dan Dequille
-Nevada’s most popular writer in the 19th century
-At the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City for 31 years
-Known as the Washoe giant
-The Big Bonanza in the definitive history of Virginia City and the Comstock Lode
-A correspondent for a variety of popular newspapers and magazines
The Mexican Mine
-Christopher von Nagy: “[Virginia City] is a cauldron of new techniques and technologies, but it is being built on the fundamentals of Latin American mining.”
-Early miners in the region had no experience mining silver and did not know how to separate it from the surrounding metals. Latino Miners crossing over from Calafornia knew centuries-old silver milling process (patio process)
-This made it possible to extract the pure silver from the mineral deposit of the Comstock. Heavy stone wheels (arrastras) and sunlight, mercury, and adobe furnaces helped Comstock miners.
-von Nagy: “Without using the patio process, why go to Virginia City? They started producing gold and producing silver and people were like, ‘hmm okay.’”
-Latinos in Virginia City may have numbered as many as 870
-Curator of the Latino Miners exhibit Mariah Mena: “The most surprising thing was the wide variety of jobs. There was everything from mulepackers to ore prospectors, musicians, seamtresses, bar owners, just pretty much everything you could imagine these people were involved in.”
-One of the major contributing factors to the lack of evidence of the Latino community in Virginia City was the great fire of 1875, which destroyed the Northern end of the town where the Latino community resided
Family Connection
-Gilman
-Abandoned by her father, raised by her mother, with no paternal support
-Moved 18 times in 14 years and lived in “cooperative ling experiences”
-Grandniece of suffragist Isabella Beecher hooker, who helped support the family and paid Perkins Gillman’s college tuition
-Gillman also the grandniece of Henry Ward Beecher, president of the American Woman’s Suffrage Association
-Great-neice of Harriett beecher Stowe
Writing
-Gillman
-Eight novels (three of which are utopian romances)
-Multitude of articles, pomes, and short stories, an autobiography and six books of essays
-Addresses feminist issues and written to advance woman’s rights
-Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898); the sexual domination and oppression of women by the strongest males, which originated in the prehistoric age as a necessary evolutionary preservation strategy, was no longer socially necessary or productive. Contributed to economic inequalities.
Marriage and “Race Work”
-Married Charles Walter Stetson, an artist
-Suffered from post-partum depression and demands of motherhood and marriage
-Divorced when realized she could not achieve her ambitions to do “race work” (for the benefit of mankind)
-Widely criticized for giving up custordy
First Wave Feminism
-July 19-20, 1848: Seneca Falls Convention, which fought for the social, civil and religious rights of women
-On the first day, only women were allowed to attend (the second day was open to men (Douglass wanted to be apart of the conference on the first day))
-Five of the organizers were in the abolitionist movement
-Discussed eleven movements* for women’s rights. All passed unanimously except for the ninth resolution, which demanded the right to vote for women
-Douglass gave an impassioned speeches in its defense before it eventually (and barey) passed
*Each movement includes smaller groups and often overlaps
Douglass on Woman’s Suffrage
-Writing after Civil War on women’s suffrage, Doulglass asked his readers to see the “plain” fact that “women themselves are diviseted of a large measure of their natural dignity by their exclusion from and participation in Government.” To “Deny women her vote,” Douglass continued, “is to abridge her natural and social power, and to deprive her of a certain measure of respect.” A woman, he concluded, “loses in her own estimation by her enforced exclusion from the elective franchise just as slaves doubted their own fitness for freedom, from the fact of being looked down upon as fit only for slaves.”
(James Bouie, 2023)
Declaration of Sentiments
-“We hold these trughts to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal”
Abortion in America
-Frequently practed from 1600 to 1900
-Many indigenous groups used black root and ceadr root to induce
-From 1776 until the mid-1800s, abortion was socially unacceptable but legal in most states
-Legality varied from colony to colony and reflected that colony’s European country. In Bristish colonies, abortion was legal if preformed before “quicking” (feeling the fetus kick). French colonies considered abortion illegal, yet they were still preformed. in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, aboirtion was considered illegal
-Slaves were subject to the rules of their owners, and the owners refused to allow their slaves to terminate pregnancies
-After 1860, stronger anti-abortion laws were passed (with assistance from the AMA) and were more vigorously enforced than previous laws. Many women used illegal underground services
-Although abortion was widely legalized in 1970, many women were still forced to obtain illegal abortion or to preform self-abortions due to the economic constraints imposed by the Hyde Amendment and the unavailability of services in many areas
-“At conception and the earliest stage of pregnancy, before quickening, no one believed that a human life existed; not even the Catholic Church took this view. RATHER, THE POPULAR ETHIC REGARDING ABORTION AND COMMON LAW WERE GROUNDED IN THE FEMALE EXPERIENCE OF THEIR OWN BODIES”
(Leslie Regan, 1997)
Comstock Law
-Anthony Comstock: devout Christian appalled by what he saw in the city’s streets (prostitutes and pornography) It seemed to him that the town was teeming with prostitutes and pornography
-Also offended by birth control ads and was certain that contraceptives promoted lust and lewdness
-Supplied police with information for raids on sex trade merchants
-In 1872, went to Washington with anti-obscenity bill, including a ban on contraceptives, that he had drafted himself
-On March 3, 1873, Congress passed the new law, alter known as the Comstock Act. The statute defined contraceptives as obscene and illicit, making is a federal offense to disseminate birth control through the mail or across state lines. Comstock was also a postal inspector
Public Response
-Not a lot of response from the American Public
-Soon after the federal law was on the books, twenty-four states enacted their own versions of Comstock laws to restrict the contraceptive trade on the state level. Whould be hundreds of thousands today
-New England residents lived under the most restrictive laws in the country. In Massachusetts, anyone disseminating contraceptives or information about could pay high fines and/or be imprisoned
-In Connecticut, using birth control was prohibited, and married couples could be arrested for using and imprisoned for up to one year
-Comstock created a two-tiered system where you could get a “medical exemption” or a “therapeutic exemption” of you were wealthy and could find your way to having an abortion
Margaret Sanger
-“Enforce motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty.”
-Arrested in 1916 for opening the first birth control clinic in America
-Resulted in the 1918 Crane Decision
~Allowed women to use both control for therapeutic purposes
-United states v. One Package (1936)
~Physicicans could not legally mail birth control devices and information throughout the country, paving the way fro the legitimization of birth control
-1972: Roe v. Wade
The End of the Comstock Act
-Supreme COurt reuled it violated the right to marita privacy
-Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) ruled that married women had the right to contraception from their doctors
-Single women didn’t have the same rights until 1972 (Eisenstadt v. Baird)
-Clarence Thomas (June 2022)
~Court’s majority found that a right to abortion was not a form of “liberty” protected by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (Which was said in Roe)
-Reference three other cases that relied on the same reasoning
~Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas (invalidated sodomy laws, made same-sex sexual activity legal, 2003), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015, marriage rights for all)
An Amazonian Race
-“In the days of ancient Greece, many centries ago, we Amazons were the foremost nation in the world. In Amazonia, women ruled and all was well.”
~Hippolyte, “Intoducting Wonder Woman”
-“A man!”
~Princess Diana cries when she finds Steve Trevor.
-“A man on Paradise Island!…America, the last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women!”
“The Period of women’s suremancy lasted through many centries”
~Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1891
-In the 19th century, suffragists, following the work of anthropologists, believed that something like the Amazons of Gree myth had once existed, a matriarchy that predated the rise of patriarchy
-1910: The word “feminism” comes into popular use
-Feminism: rests on principle of equality
-Suffrage: the right to vote
William Moulton Marston
-Psychologist, Harvard PhD
-Credited with co-creating the lie detector test. Also interested in sex, sexual difference, and sexual adjustment
-“Wonder Woman was conceived by Dr. Marson… [because] “the only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women in all fields of human activity.”
-“frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.”
The “woman’s dilemma”
-1910-20: The percentage of married women working had nearly doubled; number of married working women had risen by 40%
-Holloway: “A new way of living has to exist in the minds of men before it can be realized in the actual form”
-Free Love: better equality, better division of domestic tasks, and the idea of abolishing marriage laws that two people should be able to enter into their own romantic contracts, which should no be legal. All relationships based on love, not money
-Olive Byrne (22 year old, graduate student, niece of Margaret Sanger) moved in with Marson and Holloway. Olive Byrne is the mother of two of Marson’s four children
Women and the New Race
-Holloway: “The new race will have a far greater love capacity that the current one and I mean physical love as well as other forms.”
-Havelock Ellis (one of Sanger’s overs) argued for “the erotic rights of women.” Ellis argued that the evolution of marriage as an institution had resulted in the prohibiting of female sexual pleasure, which was derided as women and abnormal
The Bracelets
-Holloway: “A student of Dr. Marston’s wore on each wrist heavy, broad silver bracelets, one African and the other Mexican. They attracted his attention as symbols of love binding so that he adopted them for the Wonder Woman strip.”
-Olive Byrne had at that point been living with Holloway for forty-eight years
Herland as Medical Fiction
-During the Comstock Act, you could not distribute erotica or birth control, and abortion was illegal. Sex education was considered obscene
-Due to a syphilis outbreak in the 1890s, Comstock would approve public sex education if it were scientific because talking about non-human biology wasn’t considered “obscene”
-Gilman wanted to discuss sex education for a female audience while avoiding prosecution
-To her, women’s lack of body autonomy is unnatural. This is why she uses parthenogenesis (which bees and ants use): it is a natural reproductive process
-In other words, bodily autonomy is natural
Herland and Contraception
-When women begin to imagine this bodily autonomy, they gain autonomy over their own ability to fertilize or prevent fertilization
-While a Herlander may just as easily “put [conception] out of her mind,” we might also do the same. Ultimately, the power lies with the woman or, more specifically, her individual mind and body.
Voluntary Motherhood
-Early feminist slogan to reject husband’s sexual advances
-This was a bold claim at the time
-Rejected artificial methods of birth control because they might promote promiscuity. Instead, the promote natural methods like the rhythm method and withdrawal
-In “Feminism or Polygamy,” Gilman writes that “artificial processes of prevention… are promoters of vice and disease.”
Sex Education in Herland
-Ellador learns about reproductive health when she rescues a butterfly pollinating a flower
-Her “insect teacher” corrects her: it is an obernut moth, which Herlandians have “been trying to exterminate.”
-“It might have laid eggs enough to rais worms enough to destroy thousands of out nut trees-thousands of bushels of nuts-and make years and years of trouble for all of us”
-“Children all over the country were told to watch for that moth, if they were any more”
The Over Mothers
-Parthenogenesis is a form of “natural” birth control that works towards “race health”
-Reproduction is controlled by the Over Motehrs, who control “quality”
-Herlanders are described as a white “Aryan stock,” or race, who are also strong and resilient
-When “unfit” women have had offspring, the Over Mothers asked the women to “renounce motherhood”
-If this is a utopia, then the utopia is of whiteness, physical fitness, and intellectual preformance
Victorian White Nationalism
-Gilman was a staunch and self-described nativist
-Nativists believe in protecting the interests of native-born (or “established”) inhabitants above the interests of immigrants
-They also believe mental capacities are innate, rather than teachable
-In her 1908 essay, “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” Gilman advocates for compulsory, militaristic labor camps for Black Americans
-In favor of racial purity and stricter border policies (the sequel to Herland) or for sterilization and even genocide for the genetically inferior (Moving the Mountian). Also anti-Semitic
Eugenics: 1883
-Francis Galton, an English statistician, demographer, and ethnologist (and cousin of Charles Darwin), coined “eugenics”
-Health and disease, as well as social and intellectual characteristics, were based upon heredity and the concept of race
-During the 1870-80s, discussions of “human improvement” and scientific racism became more common. Groups were determined to be superior or inferior
-These same “experts” believed biological and behavioral characteristics were immutable
The American Eugenics Movement
-Began with Charles Davenport in 1900, a biologist who was inspired by Galton’s work and sought to reduce undesirable traits
-Reinforce American racist beliefs of the time and a weak understanding of Mendel and Darwin
-Believed that genetic defects caused alcoholism, poverty, and social dependency
-Around 1910, became concerned with “feeblemindedness,” which described those with low IQs, abnormal behavior, asexual promiscuity, criminal behavior, and social dependency
Fears of Industrialization and Immigration
-Idealization of motherhood
-Fear of “race suicide” (fit group would dwindle, now use Great Replacement Theory)
-“Scientific motherhood”: mothers needed scientific knowledge and expert assistance to raise healthy children
-Social reform: government could enforce marriage restrictions, sexual segregation, and sterilization laws
~Eugenics archive
Teddy Roosevelt
“Society has no business to premit degenerates to reproduce their kind… Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum.”
Churchill
“The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes… constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I am convinced that the multiplication of the Feeble-Minded, which is proceeding now at an artificial rate, unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilised conditions, is a terrible danger to the race.”
Margaret Sanger
“Birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives.”
W.E.B. DuBois
-Called for dividing the Black community into four groups
-Promoted marriage and reproduction within the most desirable group, the “talented tenth,” and wanted to breed out the lowest group, “the submerged tenth”
Francis Crick (DNA)
-The main difficulty is that people have to start thinking about eugenics in a different way. The Nazis gave it a bad name, and I think is it time something was done to make it respectable again
~My suggestion is in an attempt to solve the problem and especially those who are poorly endowed genetically having large numbers of unnecessary children… It would probably pay society to offer such individuals something like 1,000 [British pounds] down and a pension of 5 [British pounds] a week over the age of 60. As you probably know, the bribe in India is a transistor radio and apparently, there are plenty of takers.
John Harvey Kellogg
-“Long before the race reaches the state of universal incompetency, the impending danger will be appreciated… and, through eugenics and euthenics, the mental soundness of the race will be saved.”
Alexander Grahm Bell
-Chairman of the board of scientific advisers to the Eugenics Record Office.
-Honorary president of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, which advocated sterilization laws across the country for those Bell called a “defective variety of the human race”
-Some of those laws were used as models for similar laws in Nazi Germany
-“People do not understand the mental condition of a person who cannot speak and who thinks in gestures… Thoat who believe as I do, that the production of a defective race of human beings would be great calamity to the world, will examine carefully the causes that lead to the intermarriage of the deaf with the object of applying a remedy.”
Helen Keller
-“It is the possibility of happiness, intelligence and power that give life its sanctity, and they are absent in the case of a poor, misshapen, paralyzed, unthinking creature.”
-“[Allowing a] defective [child to die] is a weeding of the human garden that shows a sincere love of true life.”
Forced Sterilization
-Dr. Harry Clay Sharp and other physicians lobbied for laws to allow involuntary sterilization of the “hereditarily defective.”
-1907: first sterilization law, in Indiana (Bouche and Rivard, 2014)
-1914: Twelve more states had passed sterilization laws and 18 more eventually followed
-1914: Model Eugenical Sterilization Law proposed the sterilization of the “feebleminded” and those that had physical and mental defects
-1907-39: more than 30,000 people were sterilized unknowingly or against their consent
Other Efforts
-Prohibition of mixed-race and ‘feebleminded’ marriages
-1896: Connecticut prohibited marriages for those who were “feeble-minded” and/or had epilepsy
-1913: 29 states prohibited mixed-race marriages, as offspring with parents with two different races were deemed as genetically inferior to those that were of a single race
-This legislation continued during the 1920s and led to forced sterilization being ruled as federally legal in 1927 through the Supreme Court case, BUck v. Bell
The Ideal mother
-Since the late 19th century, white women who were affluent, educated, and respectable have been encouraged to have children
-Mothers who weren’t (and aren’t) encouraged (IVF); poor and/or uneducated, exhibited unconventional sexual behavior, had a mental or physical disability, or came from the “wrong” racial or ethnic background
-The most unfit mothers could be subjected to child removal and coerced sterilization
Carrie Buck
-Born in 1906 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Father abandoned the family, and the mother was in poverty
-When she was a toddler, John, and Alice Dobbs asked to become her foster parents after seeing Carrie’s mother on the street
-Carrie went to school until sixth grade, when she was pulled to clean the house full-time. At 17, she was raped by the Dobbs’ nephew and became pregnant
-Declared was mentally deficient with no evidence. Was committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded
Forced Sterilization
-1904-21: The rate of institutionalization for feeblemindedness nearly tripled
-Carrie had been declared a “middle-grade moron,” above “idiot” and “imbecile,” and just below normal.
~Morons are considered especially dangerous because they could pass and then breed.
*She had a child as an unmarried teenager, and her mother and daughter have been declared as unfit
-The Virginia law for forced sterilization was legally flawed, so the superintendent of Carrie’s institution used her petition for forced sterilization to bring the law forward
-It succeeded, with the Supreme Court ruling it lawful
The Results
-Thirty-two states passed eugenic-sterilization laws during the 20th century
-Between 60-70,000 people were sterilized
-Eugenics taken up by the Nazis
-Coerced or forced sterilization continued in the US. Among the Southern poor, it was known as the “Mississippi appendectomy.”
-States only began repealing their laws in the 60s and 70s, with awareness of civil rights
Continuing Legacy
-Buck v. Bell is still on the books and was cited as a precedent in 2001
-From 2006-2012, at least 148 female prisoners in CA were sterilized without permission (Center for Investigative Reporting)
-In 2015, a district attorney in Nashville was fired for including sterilization requirements in plea deals
Eugenics in American Education
-Charles Davenport’s Heredity in Relation to Eugenics “was assigned reading in many of the eugenics courses that were springing up at colleges and universities across the country and was cited in more than one-third of the high school biology textbooks of the era” (Cohen, as cited in Dolmage, 112).
-The American Eugenics Society, in 1922, reached out to “teachers of biology, sociology and psychology,” who might find it “profitable to include in their practical laboratory work… authentic family histories with special reference to the descent and recombination of natural physical and mental qualities… this cooperative work promises to be not only profitable from the standpoint of the University … but also in building up biological family records of the better American families.”
-In 1925, 1,457 of these records were collected.
-Heather Munro Prescott, medical historian: “By the late 1920s, more than 300 colleges and universities offered courses that covered eugenic themes, with as many as 20,000 students enrolled” (Dolmage, 102)
Health Centers
-In the late 19th century, some American universities began requiring medical exams as part of the admissions process and to “eliminate the unfit”
-“Physicians and scientists, and even the occasional entrepreneur, quickly identified such programs as potential sources of captive research subjects. The provision of health services in the interests of students thus blurred with the use of students as research subjects.”
