When Cee takes a moment to look at Dr. Scott’s bookshelf, she sees works on eugenics and race. The reader gleans that the experiments carried out on Cee’s uterus are a result of the doctor’s interest in this insidious “science,” so we will delve into the history of eugenics in America to offer context and clarification.
In the late 1800s, English intellectual Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics” from the Greek roots for “good” and “origin,” or “good birth.” Galton had studied the English upper classes and concluded that their superior traits, such as intelligence, were hereditary. He extended this theory to claim that selective breeding was ideal, writing in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius that as it was easy “to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.”
In the early 1900s Charles Davenport, an American biologist, and Harry Laughlin, a former teacher, began to spread the movement in this country. Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office in 1910 at Long Island’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Laughlin was its director, overseeing a horde of field workers who collected data, especially on “undesirable” traits like dwarfism, mental disability, promiscuity, and more. Race also became part of the conversation, with non-white races targeted as being inherently undesirable and inferior.
In the 1920s eugenics became more widely popular, with the establishment of the American Eugenics Society, the Race Betterment Foundation, and numerous local groups. Prominent supports in America included Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; it was taught in some schools and universities and promulgated at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. It undergirded the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which prevented “undesirables” in other countries, such as Jews, from immigrating to America. Interestingly, as Lumen Learning’s extensive course on the subject explains, “Eugenics was also supported by African Americans intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Thomas Wyatt Turner, and many academics at Tuskegee University, Howard University, and Hampton University; however they believed the best blacks were as good as the best whites and ‘The Talented Tenth’ of all races should mix. W. E. B. Du Bois believed ‘only fit blacks should procreate to eradicate the race’s heritage of moral iniquity.’"
As scholar Laura Rivard explains, a difference between the English and the American movements was that the latter was more focused on eliminating negative traits: “Not surprisingly, ‘undesirable’ traits were concentrated in poor, uneducated, and minority populations. In an attempt to prevent these groups from propagating, eugenicists helped drive legislation for their forced sterilization...The first state to enact a sterilization law was Indiana in 1907, quickly followed by California and 28 other states by 1931 (Lombardo n.d.). These laws resulted in the forced sterilization of over 64,000 people in the United States (Lombardo n.d.). At first, sterilization efforts focused on the disabled but later grew to include people whose only ‘crime’ was poverty. These sterilization programs found legal support in the Supreme Court.” In the Buck v. Bell case upholding forced sterilization for eugenic purposes, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ majority opinion stated “It is better for the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”
Speaking directly to the events of Home, Lumen Learning notes that in 1972 a “United States Senate committee testimony brought to light that at least 2,000 involuntary sterilizations had been performed on poor black women without their consent or knowledge. An investigation revealed that the surgeries were all performed in the South, and were all performed on black mothers [receiving welfare] with multiple children. Testimony revealed that many of these women were threatened with an end to their welfare benefits until they consented to sterilization. These surgeries were instances of sterilization abuse, a term applied to any sterilization performed without the consent or knowledge of the recipient, or in which the recipient is pressured into accepting the surgery. Because the funds used to carry out the surgeries came from the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, the sterilization abuse raised older suspicions, especially amongst the black community, that ‘federal programs were underwriting eugenicists who wanted to impose their views about population quality on minorities and poor women.’”
Despite the fact that the eugenics movement lost its popularity and widespread support during WWII, The New Yorker illuminates the sobering fact that “Buck v. Bell is still on the books and was cited as precedent in court as recently as 2001. Forced or coercive sterilizations never entirely went away either. In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that at least a hundred and forty-eight female prisoners in California were sterilized without proper permission between 2006 and 2010. Last year, a district attorney in Nashville was fired for including sterilization requirements in plea deals.”
