Abstract
The eugenics movement in the United States has been extensively explored by historians who have emphasized the movement’s primary aim of race betterment and the critical role of experts in popularizing eugenics ideology and policy solutions. Ladd-Taylor seeks to add nuance to this understanding by detailing the grim, brutalizing relationship between eugenics, sterilization laws, child welfare, social workers, and aid to the poor, drawing on a century of the historical record in Minnesota, beginning in the Progressive Era. She notes that the unremarkable nature of Minnesota’s eugenic efforts, in contrast to states like California and North Carolina that oversaw aggressive sterilization campaigns, makes it especially worthy of scrutiny. She argues persuasively that, while eugenic ideas about race betterment were certainly important, the state’s overriding mandate to provide as few material resources as possible to its poor citizens, coupled with its desire to save innocent, deserving children and the broader community, together drove the public welfare push to institutionalize and sterilize so-called defectives.
Ladd-Taylor begins early in the Progressive Era, when Minnesota’s poor relief was supported solely at the county level, and welfare leaders began to distinguish between delinquents (poor youth who broke the law), defectives (poor, unworthy, immoral, and feebleminded, a broad, gendered category that included sexual transgressions such as nonmarital pregnancy), and dependents (poor but worthy children, at risk by the presence of defectives). As counties sought to segregate these groups and minimize spending on the poor, separate state-funded institutions were built to confine them. In 1917, Minnesota passed the Children’s Code, sweeping legislation which established the feebleminded as a target population, expanded governmental oversight of these groups through a Board of Control (which oversaw the entire public welfare system, including child welfare, charities, and community-based agencies), and legalized compulsory commitment of defectives. When Minnesota passed its law legalizing sterilization of the insane and feebleminded in 1925, thus began its systematic process of guardianship, institutionalization, and sterilization; by the end of World War II, over 2,000 people had been eugenically sterilized, nearly 80% of them women. Though sterilization was technically voluntary in the state, Ladd-Taylor demonstrates that it was often coerced, most frequently as a condition of release from an institution.
Social workers played an integral role in this eugenics project. For example, Mildred Thomson, director of the Department for the Feebleminded—a leadership role she held for 35 years that entailed administering the institutionalization, sterilization, parole, and community placement of defectives—was a social worker. As Ladd-Taylor details, frontline social workers worked for the child welfare system (e.g., overseeing the removal and placement of the babies of defective women), managed guardianship, worked at juvenile courts assessing and categorizing delinquents into worthy and unworthy groups, staffed homes in the community where paroled young women were mandated to live after they had been sterilized, and administered poor relief, among many other roles. The foundational involvement of social workers in these reprehensible violations of human rights, dignity, and self-determination represents an ethical stain on our profession.
In summary, the book offers an exhaustive, well-researched examination of one state’s program of eugenic sterilization as a largely bureaucratic endeavor to control and minimize spending on the poor and save innocent children from the feebleminded menace. One feminist criticism I have is that when Ladd-Taylor is describing the category of delinquent, she fails to offer a gendered perspective, instead focusing on adolescent boys—whose misbehavior was understood to be part of their healthy development—as the norm. For example, she writes about the “normalization of youthful misbehavior” (p. 44). But, of course, this understanding did not apply to adolescent girls and young women: Their misbehavior rendered them defective and justified their custodial care and sterilization. Indeed, “sex delinquents,” a category later described by the author that integrated the delinquent and defective categories, was comprised entirely of female youth. More generally, the book could have been better organized (e.g., the chapter on the definition of feeblemindedness should have come earlier), and a timeline of key events would have been a welcome addition for the reader. Despite these quibbles, Fixing the Poor adds a great deal to our understanding of the relationship between eugenic sterilization, child welfare, and poor relief, and the key role that social workers played.
