“Eugenics Brought Home”: White Women Physicians and Reproductive Authority

• In Event: 20864 - Feminist and Critical Complicities, Injustices, and Culture (Co-sponsored by Section on Sociology of Culture)

Abstract

How do actors use identity to generate ownership over emerging expertise? In this paper I examine the engagement of white women physicians with the “new science” of eugenics in the early 20th century to analyze the framing of white womanhood as a disease constituency and how this structured a case for professional sovereignty over reproductive control. Although the white men who initially organized the eugenics movement initially framed women’s growing educational and professional independence as a detriment to the national project of race betterment, here I argue that white women physicians were able to reframe these critiques as supporting a unique, identity-based alignment with the eugenic project. By analyzing discussion of eugenics in women’s medical and public health journals, as well as the treatment of eugenics in popular women’s magazines, I trace the emergence of white women physicians’ strategic alignment with eugenics movements in the United States and the dissemination of their messages to lay women. These physicians adopted tactics to position themselves and their causes as not only in accordance with eugenic values, but as authoritative arbiters of eugenic intervention and expertise. Building on sociologies of expertise and medical sociologies of lay stakeholders, I argue that an examination of this oft-excised history of first-wave feminism has repercussions for both the privileging of whiteness in reproductive justice and the utility of representation more broadly.

Author

• Margaret Ruth Eby, University of Pennsylvania