“Sterilized for the Good of the State”: Moral Evaluations in American Eugenics, 1922-1972

• In Event: Comparative-Historical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Comparative-Historical Roundtable 3

Abstract

This paper explores how professionals who performed eugenic sterilizations in the United States during the 20th century interpreted the legal requirement that the operations must benefit the “good of society.” From 1907 through the 1970s, administrative panels in thirty-two U.S. states served compulsory sterilization orders on at least 60,000 people. Demographic trends in who was sterilized varied across time and place–reflecting how notions of whose reproductive body threatened the “social good” were socially constructed and subject to transformation. I present a qualitative analysis of meeting minutes from three state sterilization panels, alongside the case files they reviewed, to ask: How was “evidence” of patients’ threateningness to society constructed, presented, and evaluated? And how did this vary across time, place, and groups? I argue that rather than mapping neatly onto any demographic axes, who was targeted for sterilizations reflected clashes in moral habitus between eugenic professionals and their prospective patients–divergence in taken-for-granted notions of what constituted a life worth reproducing. That these differences mapped flexibly onto gender, race, class, and disability speaks to how moral difference (whether perceived or actual) is read as an innate product of social position.

Author

• Abby Arthur Smith, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor