Ladd-Taylor, Molly (Author)
Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. In Fixing the Poor, Molly Ladd-Taylor tells the story of these state-run eugenic sterilization programs. She focuses on one such program in Minnesota, where surgical sterilization was legally voluntary and administered within a progressive child welfare system.Tracing Minnesota’s eugenics program from its conceptual origins in the 1880s to its official end in the 1970s, Ladd-Taylor argues that state sterilization policies reflected a wider variety of worldviews and political agendas than previously understood. She describes how, after 1920, people endorsed sterilization and its alternative, institutionalization, as the best way to aid dependent children without helping the "undeserving" poor. She also sheds new light on how the policy gained acceptance and why coerced sterilizations persisted long after eugenics lost its prestige. In Ladd-Taylor’s provocative study, eugenic sterilization appears less like a deliberate effort to improve the gene pool than a complicated but sadly familiar tale of troubled families, fiscal and administrative politics, and deep-felt cultural attitudes about disability, dependency, sexuality, and gender. Drawing on institutional and medical records, court cases, newspapers, and professional journals, Ladd-Taylor reconstructs the tragic stories of the welfare-dependent, sexually delinquent, and disabled people who were labeled feebleminded and targeted for sterilization. She chronicles the routine operation of Minnesota’s three-step policy of eugenic commitment, institutionalization, and sterilization in the 1920s and 1930s and shows how surgery became the "price of freedom" from a state institution. Combining innovative political analysis with a compelling social history of those caught up in Minnesota’s welfare system, Fixing the Poor is a powerful reinterpretation of eugenic sterilization.
...MoreReview Catherine E. Rymph (2019) Review of "Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century". American Historical Review (pp. 1099-1100).
Review Amy Bix (2018) Review of "Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (pp. 525-527).
Review Diane Paul (2018) Review of "Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 561-562).
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The executioner’s shadow: Coerced sterilization and the creation of “Latin” eugenics in Chile
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Barna Szamosi;
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Medical decisions influenced by eugenics: Hungarian gynecological practices during the 1910s
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Westermann, Stefanie;
(2012)
Secret Suffering: The Victims of Compulsory Sterilization during National Socialism
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Thesis
Kelly Jo Fulkerson Dikuua;
(2019)
[Un]informed Consent: Eugenics, Forced Sterilization and Medical Violence in the Jim Crow United States and Apartheid Southern Africa
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Thesis
Carolyn Elizabeth Koester;
(2018)
The Public Good: Eugenics and Law in Ontario, 1910 to 1938
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Article
Sabine Hildebrandt;
Susan Benedict;
Erin Miller;
Michael Gaffney;
Michael A. Grodin;
(2017)
“Forgotten” Chapters in the History of Transcervical Sterilization: Carl Clauberg and Hans-Joachim Lindemann
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Chapter
Morris, Sharon;
(2006)
“Human Dregs at the Bottom of Our National Vats”: The Inter-War Debate on Sterilization of the Mentally Deficient
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Thesis
Espino, Virginia Rose;
(2007)
Women Sterilized as They Give Birth: Population Control, Eugenics, and SocialProtest in the Twentieth-Century United States
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Goodheart, Lawrence B.;
(2004)
Rethinking Mental Retardation: Education and Eugenics in Connecticut, 1818--1917
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Joseph, Jay;
Wetzel, Norbert A.;
(2013)
Ernst Rüdin: Hitler's Racial Hygiene Mastermind
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Kluchin, Rebecca M.;
(2009)
Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950--1980
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Book
Hodges, Sarah;
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Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920--1940
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Kim, Sonja;
(2008)
“Limiting Birth”: Birth Control in Colonial Korea (1910--1945)
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Thesis
David, Mirela Violeta;
(2014)
Free Love, Marriage, and Eugenics: Global and Local Debates on Sex, Birth Control, Venereal Disease and Population in 1920s-1930s China
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Article
Brown, S.;
(2009)
Hitler's Bible: An Analysis of the Relationship between American and German Eugenics in Pre-War Nazi Germany
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Book
Sarah Fawn Montgomery;
(2018)
Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir
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Thesis
Rensing, Susan Marie;
(2006)
Feminist Eugenics in America: From Free Love to Birth Control, 1880--1930
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Book
Nourse, Victoria F.;
(2008)
In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and the Near Triumph of American Eugenics
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Book
Adam Cohen;
(2017)
Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck
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Book
Hajo, Cathy Moran;
(2010)
Birth Control on Main Street: Organizing Clinics in the United States, 1916--1939
(/isis/citation/CBB001034254/)
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