A Disability History of the United States by Kim E. Nielsen

Author:Kim E. Nielsen [Nielsen, Kim E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2203-0
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2012-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

Forced sterilization by state, 1907–1937

State Date No. sterilized

Indiana 1907 2,424

Washington 1909 685

California 1909 20,108

Connecticut 1909 557

Nevada 1911 0

Iowa 1911 1,910

New Jersey 1911 0

New York 1912 42

Oregon 1917 2,341

North Dakota 1913 1,049

Kansas 1913 3,032

Michigan 1913 3,786

Wisconsin 1913 1,823

Nebraska 1915 902

South Dakota 1917 789

New Hampshire 1917 679

Alabama 1919 224

Montana 1923 256

Delaware 1923 945

Virginia 1924 8,300

Idaho 1925 38

Utah 1925 772

Minnesota 1925 2,350

Maine 1925 326

Mississippi 1928 683

West Virginia 1929 98

Arizona 1929 30

Vermont 1931 253

Oklahoma 1931 556

South Carolina 1935 277

Georgia 1937 3,284

Source: Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 294.

Proponents of sterilization argued that it was a patriotic cause, and a better solution than long-term institutionalization. For the health of the nation the electoral body had to be protected against degenerative elements. Politicians, those in the judicial system, educators, and medical experts increasingly conflated political and economic strength with bodily and mental health. In a time of growing class disparities, contested racial and gender power relationships, and large-scale immigration, democracy had to be protected. For Dr. H. C. Sharp of the Indiana Reformatory, that meant the sterilization of “degenerates”: which, he told the American Prison Association in 1909, included “most of the insane, the epileptic, the imbecile, the idiotic, the sexual perverts; many of the confirmed inebriates, prostitutes, tramps and criminals, as well as the habitual paupers found in our county poor asylums; also many of the children in our orphan homes.” Civic undesirability was slippery and broad; and the definitions of disability, degeneracy, and immorality vague and permeable. Sharp assured his reading and listening audience, however, in ironically patriotic language, that sterilizations (and he performed them without anesthesia) in no way “impaired” the “pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.”23

Perhaps because of the permeability of disability and degeneracy, related concerns spread regarded maintaining able-bodied and able-minded women. Opponents of women’s education such as Edward Clarke had warned in the 1870s that a college education had the potential to permanently damage and disable women. As the movement for female suffrage expanded, and as women’s employment and educational opportunities expanded, so did social concern about the consequences for the female body and greater society. This concern generally did not apply to all women—but focused on white middle- and upper-class women who sought expanded civic engagement.

The desire to maintain the female body needed for a healthy nation is exemplified by William Lee Howard, a prominent physician and author of parental advice books at the turn of the century. In 1909 he warned of rising physical and mental degeneration among women. According to Howard, “the female possessed of masculine ideas of independence,” who proclaimed “her sole right to decide questions of war or religion,” and “that disgusting anti-social being, the female sexual pervert,” embodied “different degrees of the same class—degenerates.” In essence, women who sexually desired other women, women who lived as gender nonconformists, and the mother “quick with children who spends her mornings at the club, discussing ‘social statistics,’” embodied different but related forms of a gender disability caused by a degenerating body and mind.

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