Claims-Making and Socio-Cultural Context in the First U.S. Eugenics Campaign

Although historians have for some time been integrating sociological concepts into their work on eugenics, sociologists have for the most part left the study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century eugenics to historians. Arguing that our understanding of eugenics can be advanced by combining sociological and historical methods, this paper undertakes a constructionist analysis of the first U.S. eugenics campaign, which redefined poor, feeble-minded women as carriers of “depraved” heredity and resulted in establishment of the first U.S. prophylactic institution. The author merges original research and the results of previous historical investigations with social problems theory to answer three questions about this “discovery” campaign: (1) How did it construct feeble-minded women as a eugenic threat? (2) Why did it (in contrast to other eugenic crusades) concentrate exclusively on women? and (3) Why was it successful?