Download And Enjoy Eugenic Nation: Faults And Frontiers Of Better Breeding In Modern America By Alexandra Minna Stern Supplied As Print

very well researched book that traces the roots, development, and consequences of eugenics in America, It is heavily focused on California and the western half of the United States, which is a bit of a drawback if youre looking for a more national history of eugenics.
Still, very much worth a read and provides plenty of food for thought, In thes eugenicist Paul Popenoe brought marriage counseling to the US, Despite having no formal psychological training, he called himself Dr, Popenoe. In his previous work Applied EugenicsPopenoe argued that Black people were “eugenically inferior” and that interracial intimacy was “biologically wrong, ” Concerned with declining white birth rates, inhe set up a counseling center known as the American Institute of Family Relations AIFR.
Racial eugenics became widely condemned after the atrocities against Jewish and Roma people during the Holocaust, Popenoe rebranded as a “marriage counselor,” protecting “family values” seeking to ensure that the “right” couples reproduced, AIFR popularized pseudoscientific “biological” understandings of human sexual difference to the masses, By thes, AIFR gave thousands of consultations a year and Popenoe wrote one of the most read columns in Ladies Home Journal only addressing marital issues faced by white Christian women.


Popenoes story is the story of postwar “reform” eugenics in the US, In the earlyth century eugenicists focused on sterilizing “feebleminded” people, While these practices continued discretely after the war, more attention was allocated to married white heterosexual couples to maximize procreation, Eugenicist Samuel Holmes advocated for monetary incentives for white female students to produce more children, as a way to stave off the “perils of Mexican invasion”.
As race became increasingly

understood as social phenomenon, sex and gender became more “tightly wedded to biology” in response,

Popenoe argued that the malefemale difference transcended all other human differences and was the “greatest than can exist between two normal human beings.
” He felt that this sex binary was essential to the survival of family, nation, and western civilization and therefore must be protected from the decadence of modern society.
Postwar eugenicists were threatened by the higher education of women which they felt “decreased birthrates of the fit”, They called for a return to traditional marriage with defined sexgender roles, arguing that “men and women were made for marriage, biologically and psychologically”.


AIFR argued that it was womens responsibility to make marriages work, Women who refused to accept their “biological destiny” as housewives were “deluded into thinking they were on par with men”, AIFR diagnosed womens disenchantment with marriage as “masculine protest,” accusing educated white women of being “ashamed of her sex”, Feminists were seen as women who were ashamed of their “biological role” as caretakers, Women and men who strayed away from their reproductive roles were seen as needing to be reconditioned, Women were advised to embark on a selftransformation course and/or feign enjoyment of sex for the purpose of marriage, InDr. Arnold Kegel joined the AIFR as a consultant and developed Kegel vaginal exercises for wives experiencing “frigidity” to undergo “even while engaged in some of her housework.
”

Prominent eugenicist Lewis Terman also collaborated with AIFR, Now that the racial assumptions of previous IQ tests had been debunked, Terman turned to sex and gender, designing a MaleFemale test to pinpoint fundamental determinants of personality.
Working with AIFR on Marital Happiness Survey, Terman concluded that successful marriages required welldefined gender norms, Using this “data,” AIFR counselors argued that the reason marriages werent working out was because people werent subscribing to traditional gender roles.


Eugenics help us understand how race, gender, ability, and sex are interconnected, In response to explicit biological racism being shunned after WWII, the idea that “sex” was the real biological truth to rank humans became increasingly popularized.
Rather than focusing exclusively on restricting the reproduction of “undesirable” groups Black people, Indigenous people, people with disabilities, and more, postwar eugenicists devised “family values” specifically to promote the reproduction of white Christians in the face of increasing racial justice and feminist empowerment.
In this way, to a great extent the racism of thes became reinforced through the sexism of thes, This book is highly significant in shaping and reshaping our understanding of eugenic not only simply as a Nazi phenomenon but also as an elongated trajectory of postwar American, babyboomer era.
It shakes the foundation of eugenic, narrowly conceived as the betterment of race through "better" breeding", to tease out this institutionalized feature of superior racial ideology manifested in a plethora of forms, from colonial medicine in the event of the Panama Canal opening to the establishment of a Californian eugenic landscape, to the rise of marital counseling and the shift to a sexgender system in thes.
Above all, this book is about the bodythe social body, imagined body, gendered body, racial body and how superstructural system attempted to police, manipulate, violate, and inscribe power on it.
This Foucauldian "political technology of the body" was elegantly articulated in a captivating phraseology accompanied by a rich amount of primary sources.
Highly recommend the chapter on policing the borderland and how ideas of racial cleanliness had been employed to discriminate and embody American exceptionalism through the professionalization of patrolmen and customhygiene specialists, as well as the chapter on the disciplining of women's body with regard to the recurring theme of biological determinism and better reproductive capacity.
This book mainly speaks about eugenics within the United States, with an emphasis on the West, To learn that up until a few decades ago places such as California had a booming eugenics practice is infuriating, Doctors, politicians, police, schools, and administrators continued to practice this horrible, racist "science" on varying types of people they deemed "unfit" for society.


From individuals with mental or physical disabilities, immigrants, black and brown citizens, the LGBTQAI community, and criminals all being forced into unnecessary and permanent experiments, this book will leave you bewildered that such things happened not that long ago and in a place where freedom is supposedly sacracent.
The title seems a bit of a misnomer, it has a very loose conception of eugenics and a specific focus on California.
It was an interesting read, but not necessarily what I think of when I think of eugenics, I finished this book feeling awfully ambivalent about it, On one hand, Stern presents a nuanced, thoughtful, and complicated history of eugenics in CA, She rightly points out the limitations in histories of eugenics that focus only on the east coast, thes, and outright coercion.
Instead, Stern opts for an approach that emphasizes how eugenic ideas informed everything from conservation to immigration policy, On the other hand, the book felt a little too disjointed, the sprawling g history Stern presents covers a vast array of topics quickly, I was left wanting a little more information about how the pieces for together,

Many people assume that eugenics all but disappeared with the fall of Nazism, but as this sweeping history demonstrates, the idea of better breeding had a wide and surprising reach in the United States throughout the twentieth century.
With an original emphasis on the American West, Eugenic Nation brings to light many littleknown factsfor example, that onethird of the involuntary sterilizations in this country occurred in California betweenandas it explores the influence of eugenics on phenomena as varied as racebased intelligence tests, school segregation, tropical medicine, the Border Patrol, and the environmental movement.


Eugenic Nation begins in thes, when influential California eugenicists molded an extensive agenda of better breeding for the rest of the country.
The book traces hereditarian theories of sex and gender to the culture of conformity of thes and moves to thes, arguing that the liberation movements of that decade emerged in part as a challenge to policies and practices informed by eugenics.
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