How state welfare politics-not just concerns with "race
improvement"-led to eugenic sterilization practices. Honorable
Mention, 2018 Outstanding Book Award, The Disability History
AssociationShortlist, 2019 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian
Historical Association Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states
legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. In
Fixing the Poor, Molly Ladd-Taylor tells the story of these
state-run eugenic sterilization programs. She focuses on one such
program in Minnesota, where surgical sterilization was legally
voluntary and administered within a progressive child welfare
system. Tracing Minnesota's eugenics program from its conceptual
origins in the 1880s to its official end in the 1970s, Ladd-Taylor
argues that state sterilization policies reflected a wider variety
of worldviews and political agendas than previously understood. She
describes how, after 1920, people endorsed sterilization and its
alternative, institutionalization, as the best way to aid dependent
children without helping the "undeserving" poor. She also sheds new
light on how the policy gained acceptance and why coerced
sterilizations persisted long after eugenics lost its prestige. In
Ladd-Taylor's provocative study, eugenic sterilization appears less
like a deliberate effort to improve the gene pool than a
complicated but sadly familiar tale of troubled families, fiscal
and administrative politics, and deep-felt cultural attitudes about
disability, dependency, sexuality, and gender. Drawing on
institutional and medical records, court cases, newspapers, and
professional journals, Ladd-Taylor reconstructs the tragic stories
of the welfare-dependent, sexually delinquent, and disabled people
who were labeled "feebleminded" and targeted for sterilization. She
chronicles the routine operation of Minnesota's three-step policy
of eugenic commitment, institutionalization, and sterilization in
the 1920s and 1930s and shows how surgery became the "price of
freedom" from a state institution. Combining innovative political
analysis with a compelling social history of those caught up in
Minnesota's welfare system, Fixing the Poor is a powerful
reinterpretation of eugenic sterilization.
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