Eugenics (1 gen 1870 anni – 1 gen 1920 anni)

Descrizione:

definition:
An emerging “science” of human breeding in the late nineteenth century that argued that mentally deficient people should be prevented from reproducing.

Meanwhile, though, some of the most dubious applications of evolutionary ideas were codified into new reproductive laws based on eugenics, a so-called science of human breeding. Eugenicists argued that so-called mentally deficient people should be prevented from reproducing. They proposed to sterilize those deemed “unfit,” especially residents of state asylums for the insane or mentally disabled. In early-twentieth-century America, almost half the states enacted eugenics laws. By the time eugenics subsided in the 1930s, tens of thousands of people had been sterilized, with California and Virginia taking the lead. Women in Puerto Rico and other U.S. imperial possessions also suffered from eugenic policies.

A black-and-white photograph from the New York Daily Tribune shows an extract of the article about eugenics.
Popular Eugenics

Americans encountered eugenics — the “science” of human breeding — through newspaper reports like this one from 1912. By offering advice on who to marry and what risky traits to look for in a potential spouse, advocates of eugenics promised to make future generations more mentally and physically fit. Grounded in racial hierarchies, eugenics resulted in forced sterilization of those deemed “unfit,” particularly women of color.


The headlines read, "Eugenists Would Improve Human Stock by Blotting Out Blood Taints." Below the headlines is a series of four photographs, three women and a man, with captions. The caption of the first photograph reads, "Classed as a high grade imbecile. This girl, eighteen years, possesses the brain of a child of seven." The caption of the second photo reads, "Although nineteen years old, this girl is only seven years old mentally." The third photo's caption reads, "physically a woman between 25 and 30 years, mentally she is only six." The caption of the fourth photo reads, "This man, thirty-seven years old, has only the mentality of a child of eight and one-half years." Below the photographs, the text on the left reads "Scientists are studying how to cut down the awful cost to mankind of bad heredity, which often swells from a tiny pool to a black ocean of mental defection." The text below the photographs on the right reads "Startling examples are many, a single instance here recorded, reveals the extension of a crop of wild oats into a morass of hundreds of wretched lives."

Advocates of eugenics had a broad impact. Because they associated mental unfitness with “lower races” — including people of African, Asian, and Native American descent — their arguments lent support to Jim Crow segregation laws and racial discrimination. In a wave of legislation beginning in the 1870s and peaking in the 1910s, most states in the South and West passed laws prohibiting interracial marriage, claiming that only separation of the races could foster human advancement. By warning that immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe would dilute white Americans’ racial purity, eugenicists also helped win passage of immigration restriction in the 1920s.

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