Carrie Buck Research Articles

The feebleminded and unfit should not have babies – American eugenics in K.D. Alden’s A Mother’s Promise

ABSTRACT The concept of eugenics took an exclusionary and abusive turn in the first decades of the twentieth century, when prominent lawyers, scientists and first-wave feminists championed the cause. Indiana’s 1907 eugenicist ruling was adopted by thirty-two states, and consequently forced sterilizations were performed on whomever lawmakers considered unworthy of bearing children. The most notorious case of sterilization, Buck v. Bell, was performed on Carrie Buck, a victim of rape. K. D. Alden’s novel, A Mother’s Promise (2021), is a fictional rendering of the story, which depicts the fractures of American legal and social structures. By drawing Ruth-Ann Riley’s portrait, Buck’s fictional counterpart, it convincingly exposes America’s restrictive practices. This paper aims at exploring, through a feminist perspective, Riley’s struggle against overbearing eugenicist practices, performed by pseudo-scientists and lawyers who utilized eugenics to promote their professional and economic interests. Additionally, based on Foucault’s theory of power-knowledge relations, the paper demonstrates how, within this context, power and knowledge sustain each other. Finally, it relates the ethical issues concerning misogynistic practices and objectifying women’s bodies that were at stake one hundred years ago to twenty-first-century feminist discourse with respect to the #MeToo movement and the overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision.

About Carrie Buck and the Eugenics Movement - #How Pseudoscience Dictates Reproductive Rights Policy in the United States of America (U.S.A) - #Michael Ayele (a.k.a) W

About Carrie Buck and the Eugenics Movement - #How Pseudoscience Dictates Reproductive Rights Policy in the United States of America (U.S.A) - #Michael Ayele (a.k.a) W

HF01-04 THE VIRGINIA STERILIZATION ACT: A CATALYST FOR AMERICAN EUGENICS

You have accessJournal of UrologyCME1 Apr 2023HF01-04 THE VIRGINIA STERILIZATION ACT: A CATALYST FOR AMERICAN EUGENICS Davis Moore, Theodore Cisu, and Adam Klausner Davis MooreDavis Moore More articles by this author , Theodore CisuTheodore Cisu More articles by this author , and Adam KlausnerAdam Klausner More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000003243.04AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: The origins of the American eugenics movement are rooted in the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act of 1924. This set a historic precedent that led to the Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell (1927), which legitimized sterilization to prevent the birth of more “defective” individuals. More than 3,000 men underwent forced sterilization via vasectomy in Virginia alone. METHODS: A review of historical and medical literature was undertaken, as well as analysis of academic texts on American sterilization and eugenics. RESULTS: In the early 20th century, an increasing number of physicians promoted forced sterilization of “feebleminded” men and women to prevent the propagation of undesirable character traits in American society. One notable early proponent of eugenics was Harvey E. Jordan, dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia and president of the American Genetic Association. The movement gained support from other prominent physicians including acclaimed urologist and birth control advocate William J. Robinson who wrote the early seminal books on contraception, including Eugenics, Marriage, and Birth Control in 1917. Although the first eugenic sterilization law was passed in Indiana in 1907, it was not until the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 that the practice of eugenic sterilization was codified as a legitimate medical practice. In its historic Buck v. Bell decision of 1927, the Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilization did not violate the 14th Amendment. The case centered around Carrie Buck in Charlottesville, VA who was deemed “defective” and “feebleminded” after being raped by the nephew of her foster parents. She was institutionalized after giving birth, and later sterilized in October 1927 as a result of the Supreme Court decision. Over the next four decades, the rate of eugenic sterilization soared nationwide. Estimates of the number of men and women undergoing forced vasectomies and salpingectomies in Virginia range from 7,300 to 8,300 between 1924 and 1979, with historical estimates of more than 60,000 sterilizations across the US. The American eugenics movement has been credited with lending inspiration to Adolf Hitler and the architects of the Holocaust. CONCLUSIONS: Virginia remained the last state to practice eugenic sterilization, repealing the statute in 1974. More than 3,000 forced vasectomies were performed in the state, and tens of thousands others across the country. The now infamous Buck v. Bell decision has yet to be overturned. Virginia Gov. Mark Warner issued a formal apology in 2002 for Virginia’s embrace of eugenics for more than five decades. Source of Funding: N/A © 2023 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 209Issue Supplement 4April 2023Page: e257 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2023 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Davis Moore More articles by this author Theodore Cisu More articles by this author Adam Klausner More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

Modernism, Mental Hygiene, and the Embodiment of Mental Disability

Shifting views of human embodiment during the American mental hygiene movement produced a distinction between what I refer to as psychic and organic forms of mental disability. These categories are useful for better understanding the varying treatment of intellectual difference in twentieth-century Anglo-American society and modernist literature. Applying them to the parallel lives of Emily Holmes Coleman and Carrie Buck illuminates the importance of race and socio-economic class in determining which mental disabilities were diagnosed as immaterial products of the mind's processes—and therefore less dangerous to society—and which were condemned as genetic material defects. Although Coleman's novel, The Shutter of Snow (1930), depicts a psychic condition that overcomes and critiques conceptions of intellectual normalcy, her life and work ultimately suggest the extent to which both modernism and the modernist notion of liberating insanity depend on the doppelganger of an organically defective other for their meaning.

Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

Book Review: Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

Book Review: <i>Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck</i>

Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

Introduction

Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky In this issue, I am pleased to say, we have our usual medley, ranging from one of the iconic Marshall Court rulings to the twentieth century. There is fraud, pestilence, bad science, the free press, and how little Abe Fortas grew up and thrived in Memphis. And we also have Grier Stephenson, guiding the reader on new books regarding the Court. You have read many times in my introduction that the field of legal and constitutional history, while lively, is rather small, and that its practitioners, for the most part, all know each other. I can remember when one ofmy books came out, and my older son read the blurbs on the back cover, looked at who had written them, and then said to me “All the usual suspects.” Actually, I think it rather rare that when a book in this field comes out the author would not know the blurb writers. Charles Hobson is an old friend, whose work on the Marshall Papers is a model of manuscript editing. The case he is writing on is a favorite of law and history teachers because the great Yazoo land fraud is almost certain to get students talking. Why, they ask, should the fruits ofbribery and corruption not be taken away from those who profited from them? Why, indeed. Hobson, who is retired after teaching for many years with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College ofWilliam and Mary, shows that there are many sides to this case, and, although it remains the first time the Supreme Court declared a statute unconstitutional, by then it did not matter. We don’t get too many articles submitted about nineteenth-century state cases on the Bible, and we get about the same number about Stanley Matthews, who served on the Court from 1881 until his death in March 1889. As a Justice he is remembered primarily for three decisions that limited the power of the states, including the Supreme Court’s ruling in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886). But if Stanley’s tenure on the Bench appears rather drab, just the opposite is true of his pre-Court career: an antislavery Democrat in Ohio, a federal attorney responsible for enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, a Union veteran of the Civil War, and one of the draftsmen ofthe Compromise of 1877, which 238 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY installed his Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House. Although a devout Presbyterian, Mat­ thews opposed religious instruction in the public schools, and led the campaign in Cincinnati to do away with Bible reading to start the school day. Linda Przybyszewski, associate professor of history at the Univer­ sity of Notre Dame, another well-known colleague whose work has previously ap­ peared in the Journal, looks at the famous (at the time) Cincinnati Bible War, and the rather interesting—and highly religious—arguments Matthews made. Although Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is often ranked as one of the three greatest Justices to serve on the High Court (along with John Marshall and Louis Brandeis), there has always been one stain on his escutcheon, that of Buck v. Bell (1927). By a vote of 8-1, the Court upheld a Virginia forced sterilization law, and Holmes’s short opinion is marked by the phrase “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” As several scholars have since taught us, neither Carrie Buck, her mother, nor her daughter were feeble-minded. In trying to explain the decision, the usual story is that in areas such as forced steriliza­ tion, Holmes and his Brethren believed the practice to fall within the police powers of the state. Daniel Frost, assistant professor of political science at Clemson University, however, shows that police power jurispru­ dence, with its insistence that there be no class legislation, was actually used in several state courts to strike down forced sterilization laws, and he asks why the High Court acted as it did. For years now, many of us in the field of legal history have emphasized that students need to know not only the holdings in important cases, but the facts that led to the litigation, and especially the...

The Crisis of Disability Is Violence

The Crisis of Disability Is Violence

Comment from the Field

That November day, Carrie had already been locked up for five months, her mother for four years. I read the histories, track the dates, trace the chronology. This story starts in so many places all at once. Starts with Carrie's mother Emma being arrested, deemed feebleminded, and committed to the Colony for alleged sex work. Starts with the Virginia state legislature passing the Eugenical Sterilization Act, which makes state-mandated and -coerced sterili- zation legal. Starts with Carrie being raped by a nephew of her foster family and becoming pregnant. Starts with her naming that nephew, calling him out as a rapist. Starts with her foster family, the Dobbs, reacting by declaring Carrie feebleminded and committing her to the same state institution that housed her mother.It is 1924, and Carrie is eighteen. Three years later, her body-poor and white-lands in the U.S. Supreme Court as the judges decide the case Buck v. Bell. They declare compulsory sterilization laws constitutional, at which point the state of Virginia sterilizes Carrie and only then releases her. Emma, on the other hand, never gets out, dying at the Colony.I, diagnosed mentally retarded in 1966, imagine, yearn, stretch toward Carrie, judged feebleminded in 1924. So many bodies have vanished into the whirlpool of history. Carrie, I keep waiting for the histories to mourn, rage, reach toward you, your body as solid as your mother's hand on your shoulder. Both of you look steely-eyed into the camera. You know the photo, you and Emma sitting outside at the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. I imagine Carrie's voice-poor, rough, southern. Imagine her head cocked. Imagine how she might tell this story.1The news men come around now and again. They always want to know if I missed having children. Ask as if that's the only regret they can imagine. Oh, I got plenty of regrets, but kids are only one of many. Least I've not been a live-in for a long time. Swore when me and Billy got married, I'd keep my own house. No more sleeping in the butt cold back room of whatever cold-eyed missus I cooked and cleaned for. I liked being Missus Eagle.I find reams of information, dozens of portraits, a plentiful record of the eugenicists who engineered the case against Carrie-Albert Priddy, and later John Bell after Priddy's death, Aubrey Strode, and Irving Whitehead. They needed their sterilization law determined constitutional and so went looking for a case to take all the way to the Supreme Court. Have the historians forgotten? There'd be no story without Carrie's body.The body as gristleand synapse, waterand bone, pure emptyspace, the bodyas legal precedent.Imagination becomes a kitchen table, formica yellowed and cracking. Carrie sits sucking hard candy. Keeps talking. Says: I've seen those pictures. Hell, I sent that bastard Bell my wedding photo when he asked (Carrie Buck's Photograph of her Wedding). Mr. Bell, he was the big boss man at the Colony. I'd flat out refuse now, but back then Mama still lived up there, and me and Billy dreamed of bringing her to live with us. I thought playing nice with Mr. Bell might help my case. So I sent him that photo of us looking so fine, me grinning up a storm. Billy'd just run his hand through my hair, down my back. That man's hands could be so shockingly soft. We were silly happy that day. And up they went and just cut Billy out of the picture (Carrie Buck, from 'The Progress of Eugenical Sterilization'). Simply cut the photo in two. Threw out Billy's half. All they wanted was a photo of Carrie Buck for their precious little records. I hated their cameras, their files, their tests. They weren't even tricky, goddamn liars. Back then I thought I could leave all of the heartache behind by becoming Missus William Eagle.Aubrey Strode prosecuted the court case named after Carrie Buck and wrote the law under which she was sterilized. Irving Whitehead supposedly defended her. …

Three generations, no imbeciles: eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell

generations of are enough. Few lines from Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent feebleminded and socially inadequate people from having children. It is the only time the Supreme Court endorsed surgery as a tool of government policy. Paul Lombardo's startling narrative exposes the Buck case's fraudulent roots. In 1924 Carrie Buck-involuntarily institutionalized by the State of Virginia after she was raped and impregnated-challenged the state's plan to sterilize her. Having already judged her mother and daughter mentally deficient, Virginia wanted to make Buck the first person sterilized under a new law designed to prevent hereditarily defective people from reproducing. Lombardo's more than twenty-five years of research and his own interview with Buck before she died demonstrate conclusively that she was destined to lose the case before it had even begun. Neither Carrie Buck nor her mother and daughter were the imbeciles condemned in the Holmes opinion. Her lawyer-a founder of the institution where she was held-never challenged Virginia's arguments and called no witnesses on Buck's behalf. And judges who heard her case, from state courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court, sympathized with the eugenics movement. Virginia had Carrie Buck sterilized shortly after the 1927 decision. Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned. Three Generations, No Imbeciles tracks the notorious case through its history, revealing that it remains a potent symbol of government control of reproduction and a troubling precedent for the human genome era.

The Body Politic and the Politics of the Body

The Body Politic and the Politics of the Body Margaret Marsh (bio) Lisa Forman Cody. Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth–Century Britons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. vii + 353 pp.; ill. ISBN 0–19–926864–9 (cl). Tom Davis. Sacred Work: Planned Parenthood and its Clergy Alliances. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. ix + 245 pp.; ill. ISBN 0–8135–3493–3 (cl). Judith A. Houck. Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine, and Menopause in Modern America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. ix + 328 pp. ISBN 0–674–02740–X (cl). Jennifer Nelson. Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2003. ix + 224 pp. ISBN 0–8147– 5821–5 (cl). Rickie Solinger. Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America. New York: New York University Press, 2005. vii + 301 pp. ISBN 0–8147–9827–6 (cl). Alexandra Minna Stern. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. vii + 247 pp.; ill. ISBN 0–520–24443–6 (cl). D. Kelly Weisberg. The Birth of Surrogacy in Israel. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005. vii + 291 pp.; ill. ISBN 0–8130–2809–4 (cl). Consider the following six stories: Surrey, England, 1726: Farm worker Mary Toft finds herself pregnant. A few months later, she claims to have given birth to rabbits after having dreamed of them during her pregnancy, a claim verified by two reputable physicians. A credulous public provides her with a brief period of notoriety, but soon, she confesses to having abetted a hoax. Although the circumstances—the young woman was poor and passive, and had been manipulated by greedy acquaintances—were as sad as they were bizarre, she is vilified and jailed for having perpetrated a scandal. [End Page 181] Sacramento, California, 1909: Legislators enact the third sterilization bill to be passed in the United States, following Indiana by two years and the state of Washington by only a few weeks. The law authorizes the medical superintendents of asylums and prisons to “asexualize” inmates or patients if the superintendent believes that sterilization would improve their “physical, mental, or moral condition.” By 1921, more than two thousand Californians would be sterilized, amounting to about eighty percent of all sterilizations nationwide. Charlottesville, Virginia, 1920: Carrie Buck, the daughter of a single woman labeled as both a prostitute and “feebleminded,” becomes homeless when the state assigns her mother to the Colony of Epileptics and Feebleminded in 1920. Sent as a housekeeper to the home of a local citizen, Buck is raped and becomes pregnant in 1923. She herself is now declared feebleminded and the state rules that she should be sterilized. Buck sues, losing in the Supreme Court in 1927. A long era of legal involuntary sterilization in the United States ensues. Durham, North Carolina, 1949: Duke University endocrinologist Edwin Hamblen, in a popular book called The Change of Life, assures women that their postmenopausal years could be among their most productive. The end of a woman’s reproductive life, he tells them, would open up a new age of creativity. Menopause and its aftermath, he declares, provides women with the opportunity to realize their own hopes and dreams. Freed from burdensome reproductive functions, women could look forward to a time of freedom. Every woman could enjoy the prime of her life (and have the time of her life) in the postmenopausal years. New York City, 1958: A young married woman suffering from complications of diabetes is admitted to Kings County Hospital. While there, she asks to be fitted for a diaphragm, since she and her physicians agree that another pregnancy would endanger her life. Her physician makes the appointment with her, but then his superiors order him not to proceed. It is the policy of public hospitals in New York, the doctor learns, not to provide contraception to any woman, married or not, because of the opposition of the Catholic Church to birth control. Elected officials in New York are fearful of inflaming Catholic opinion by providing birth control to any users of public hospital services, no matter what their personal beliefs. Phoenix, Arizona, 1962: Twenty...

The Conspiracy of the Good: Civil Rights and the Struggle for Community in Two American Cities, 1875-2000

Conspiracy of the Good provides an interesting account of public education in Pasadena, California, and Charlottesville, Virginia. Its focus is primarily on Pasadena—“one of the prettiest towns in America, and probably the richest,” one observer wrote in 1932 (p. 217). The evidence from Charlottesville is used primarily to provide counterpoint. The book includes parallel narratives, as well as tangential descriptions of numerous other matters. Michael E. James begins with accounts of two events of the 1990s—one of an upper-crust party on a bridge that spans Pasadena's Arroyo Seco Canyon, the other of “six young African-American boys … gunned down on a quiet residential street” (p. ix). He ends with snapshots of a civic ordinance that prohibited employers from recruiting day laborers in Pasadena, of nonwhite youths assaulting Caucasians and Asians in Charlottesville, and of modern public housing (where the projects in both cities experienced the usual downward spiral). There are additional discussions of temperance campaigns, zoot suit riots, the angst of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the sterilization of Carrie Buck.

Eugenics and sterilization in the heartland.

On May 2 2002 Mark Warner governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia apologized for participation in eugenics which he categorized as a shameful effort in which state government never should have been involved (Virginia Apologizes 2002). Governor Warners apology was issued on the 75th anniversary of the United States Supreme Courts decision in Buck v. Bell (1927) which opened the floodgates (Smith & Polloway 1993) for the wholesale sterilization of people with epilepsy or who were then classified as feeble- minded. It was also the anniversary of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes now infamous statement that three generations of imbeciles are enough Fittingly Virginia also dedicated a historical marker to the memory of Carrie Buck who became the first person to be forcibly sterilized under Virginias 1924 law on sterilization upheld by the 1927 Supreme Court decision. Virginia has received the lions share of publicity with regard to human sterilization in part due to the infamy of the Buck v. Bell case and its impact on the subsequent rate of sterilizations; in part because so many sterilizations were performed in that state after Buck v. Bell; and in part because the voices in our field that have most persistently and eloquently reminded us not to forget this portion of our past have often come from Virginia (Smith 1994 1995; Smith & Nelson 1989; Smith & Polloway 1993). It is worth noting however that in considering the appropriate response to the occasion of Virginias apology the stain of sterilization is not limited to the Commonwealth of Virginia but permeates the fabric of our country. There are undoubtedly many more apologies owed. Virginia was neither first to the sterilization scene nor perhaps the most enthusiastic of its enactors (although Kevless 1995 noted that by the end of the 1940s Virginia was second nationally in the total number of sterilizations performed accounting for roughly one seventh of all sterilizations in the country up to that time. (excerpt)

Carrie Buck's pedigree

EUGENICS The field of eugenics had its origins in the early genetic theories of Gregor Mendel and the studies of biometrics pioneered by British aristocrat Francis Galton. Galton was first to coin the term eugenics, which he defined as “hereditarily endowed with noble qualities” or more simply “well-born.” Galton focused both on positive inheritance—that is, encouraging people of “good breeding” to marry—as well negative eugenics, which placed barriers to childbirth in the way of individuals with suspect heredity. Galton’s most fervent American followers emphasized the negative features of eugenics. Identifying heredity as the determinant of a person’s physical, social, intellectual, and moral attributes, they advocated social policies to discourage or prevent the poor and people with disabilities, ill health, or intellectual limitations from marrying or bearing children. The American epicenter of the eugenics movement was the ERO at Cold Spring Harbor, NY, established by biologist Charles Davenport in 1910 to conduct family studies and publish research findings in the Galtonian tradition. Publications such as the Eugenics Record Office Bulletin disseminated the eugenics ideology. The first Eugenics Record Office Bulletin was an essay by famous psychologist and student of mental health Henry Goddard and was titled “The Heredity of Feeblemindedness.”2 Goddard analyzed 15 pedigree charts used to demonstrate hereditary transmission of mental pathology. Davenport himself authored other Bulletins, such the “Trait Book,”3 an extensive elaboration of personal characteristics purportedly controlled by heredity. The “Trait Book” described behaviors such as laziness, criminality, and a susceptibility to certain diseases, alongside “propensities” to follow the vocation of sailor, lawyer, or physician—also thought to be hereditary traits. Davenport also compiled “the Family History Book,” a primer on charting the inheritance of Carrie Buck’s pedigree

This month in J Lab Clin Med: Issue highlights for October 2001

This month in J Lab Clin Med: Issue highlights for October 2001

Sexuality, Fertility, and Danger: Twentieth-Century Images of Women with Cognitive Disabilities

Historically, women with cognitive disabilities in the United States have been portrayed as sexually and socially threatening, and in need of professional management and control. Expressions of concern over the “sexual nature” of this group are still present in medical, legal, and popular cultural discourse. This presentation considers five examples (four nonfiction and one fictional) where the sexual identities of women with cognitive disabilities received national scrutiny: the sterilization of Carrie Buck; the institutionalization of “Deborah Kallikak” the Glen Ridge sexual assault case; the sterilization of Cindy Wasiek; and the movie “The Other Sister.” These examples reveal that implicit cultural assumptions (modern fairy tales) about the sexuality and fertility of women with cognitive disabilities are embedded in United States history, and still very much in evidence today.

Thoughts on the Changing Meaning of Disability

In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law in the case that came to be known as Buck v. Bell ( 1927). Carrie Buck was the first person to be eugenically sterilized under the authority of that law. The law allowed a state to sterilize people diagnosed as incompetent and deemed likely to genetically transmit physical, psychological, or social disabilities to their offspring.

The Sterilization of Carrie Buck.

Inside story of America's first compulsory sterilization. Electrifying disclosures by Carrie herself.