Description
Book SynopsisThis book shows how eugenic sterilization policies were maintained after the 1940s in the United States and Canada despite the discrediting of such theories by comparable Nazi Germany policies. It focuses on the individual experience of victims of sterilization, the doctors concerned, and the mental health institutions that protected the system.
Trade Review“Sterilized by the State is the best general history of sterilization policy to date, combining a wide reading of the international literature on the topic with extensive archival research. The interviews with victims of sterilization add a human-interest dimension to the book, which helps link the authors’ emphasis on ideas with the actual implementation of sterilization policies on the ground. As harrowing as the victims’ stories are, the authors don’t descend to cheap moralizing, but rather place the events and people associated with the history of sterilization in their appropriate contexts. This is a landmark publication.” – Ian Dowbiggin, University of Prince Edward Island
“Sterilized by the State highlights the persistence of forced sterilization practices after World War II, a salient topic given that most research on eugenics has assumed that sterilization practices fizzled out in the post–World War II era. There is little previously published material that engages in depth with sterilization practices in the postwar decades in the United States, and none to my knowledge that does so from a political science angle. Hansen and King break the trend not only by asking why sterilization policies were developed, but also by exploring those contexts where they were not. I expect this volume to change our current understanding of these analytical questions of policy analysis and, more empirically, of sterilization practices in the postwar period. I have no doubt that this will become a groundbreaking volume.” – Véronique Mottier, Jesus College, University of Cambridge
Table of ContentsPart I: 1. Introduction: coerced sterilization: outcomes, theories, methods; 2. The eugenicists: short portraits; 3. Eugenic anxieties; 4. Homes for the feebleminded; 5. The eugenicists' first throw: sterilization before the Second World War; 6. Buck v. Bell and beyond; 7. Sterilization thwarted; Part II: 8. Sterilization and murder in Nazi Germany; 9. Revival and recovery: eugenics in new clothes; 10. Eugenics and world population growth; Part III: 11. The sterilized: voices from Alberta and Oregon; 12. Postwar sterilization: institutions and abuse; 13. Welfare, African Americans, and coerced sterilization; 14. Those who sterilized; 15. Conclusion: a century of coerced sterilization.
