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Title: Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom by Wendy Kline ISBN: 0-520-22502-3 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 05 November, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An excellent reference
Comment: Building a Better Race is a compelling narrative. This is an important addition to the history of eugenics, weaving together evidence from patient records, professional journals, popular magazines, manuscript collections, and eugenics tracts. It is also very well written and an enjoyable read.
Rating: 1
Summary: Eugenics is Rooted in Free Love
Comment: The Los Angeles Times Book Review claims that Wendy Kline's book is:
"[A] powerful argument that today's right-wing preoccupation with family morality is rooted in the eugenics movement of the 1920s."
If that's true, then Ms. Kline book's puts a spin on eugenics that has no basis in fact. No less an authority than Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger noted in her 1938 autobiography that, "Eugenics, which had started long before my time, had once been defined as including free love and the prevention of conception."
Eugenics, in short, began with the sorts of people who think sex has nothing to do with marriage or children, hardly the point of view that the LA Times sneeringly dismisses as a "right wing."
The conservative stance on marriage and family life is not new. It's rooted in Judaism and Christianity and predates eugenics by at least 3,000 years. More recently the sterner views of family life were advocated by the Puritans and the sentimental ones by writers such as Charles Dickens (and Victorian morality)--all well before a few odd Englishmen like Francis Dalton came up with eugenics from 1865 on.
The nasty sort of eugenics, the kind that wanted the state to dictate who could have children and who should be sterilized, was as much a part of left-to-liberal axis as legalized abortion is today. You see it in the writings of H. G. Wells (Mankind in the Making) or Margaret Sanger (The Pivot of Civilization). In the May 8, 1927 issue of the NY Times, just days of the US Supreme Court declared forced sterilization constitutional, Victoria Woodhull Martin, feminist of feminists, told a reporter that she had been advocating eugenics and the sterilization of the "unfit" for fifty years. Those were the eugenists.
In contrast, the leading opponents of eugenics were almost invariably conservative and religious. One of the few books to attack eugenics in its heyday was Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton, a 'reactionary' Catholic.
Unfortunately, Kline can't distinguish between what a movement is really about and the rhetoric it uses. In the baby boom of the 1950s, virtually everyone claimed to support large, happy families. But the driving force for that wasn't the eugenics movement. Eugenists were not that powerful. (Who's heard of the Human Betterment Foundation?) It was the impact of post-war prosperity on a generation that had grown up in Depression and war.
For eugenics, it was a time to hide and lie. Nazism forced eugenists, such as Alan Guttmacher (VP of the American Eugenics Association), to lurk within population control groups and talk sweetly about families. But when the "Population Explosion" hysteria of the 1960s arrived, that mask came off and those with a eugenic agenda began to talk yet again as if parenthood were a crime.
If you're interested in eugenics as it really was, you might give Kline's little tale a pass. There are far better books than hers. And if you have the time, read the eugenists themselves rather than this sanitized version of their history.
Rating: 5
Summary: Fascinating read, not only for academics!
Comment: Think you have learned all there is to know about the eugenics movement?
This book challenges the common wisdom that the eugenics movement fell apart when it was discredited by the horrors of Nazi Germany. Kline uses her meticulous research of original documents to map the path of the insidious belief of white upper-class Americans that the reproductive behavior of women of all classes must be controlled.
Don't know anything about eugenics?
If you are interested in learning about the roots of current hot topics such as the definition of "family values," sterilization of prisoners or the mentally ill, welfare programs for poor mothers, and the availability of quality affordable day care, this is the book for you!
The author writes in a way that is grounded in real life and understandable to the general reader, without simplifying the complex issues she addresses. Her use of fascinating case studies makes this book extremely readable at the same time that she makes important connections between race, class, sexuality, and reproduction. Everyone should read this book!
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Title: The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea by Elof Axel Carlson ISBN: 0879695870 Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press Pub. Date: 15 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race by Edwin Black ISBN: 1568582587 Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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Title: In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity by Daniel J. Kevles ISBN: 0674445570 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: July, 1998 List Price(USD): $21.50 |
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Title: The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism by Stefan Kuhl ISBN: 0195149785 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: February, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism by Nancy Ordover ISBN: 0816635595 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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