Healing bodies and saving the race: Women, public health, eugenics, and sexuality, 1890--1950

In the early twentieth century United States, public health professionals, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, eugenic field workers, and social workers worked in clinics and on research projects that aimed to improve reproductive health, study sexuality, and/or identify sexual deviance. My work examines the connections between public health programs, gender, and eugenics in order to explore how ideals of sexual and reproductive norms developed in the United States between the years 1890 and 1945. To that end I explore how ideas that link heredity and sexual delinquency get imbedded in particular places. My focus is on professional health care workers, their training, research projects, and their impact on policies that effected reproductive freedom. The historical connections between eugenics and sexuality continue to be relevant.; During the 1990s many states attempted, some with more success than others, to tie welfare benefits to sexual and reproductive behavior. Proposals often denied additional welfare benefits to mothers that had more than one or two children on the basis that these women would raise children that would also be welfare recipients. These legislative debates subtly echoed early twentieth century eugenicists' arguments to limit feebleminded women's fertility through forced sterilization. Legislators no longer advocated eugenics, nor did they suggest biological reasons for sterilization, yet they still insisted poor women should not bear children because they did not demonstrate middle class norms of sexual and reproductive behavior. These ideas resonate in today's society because sexually active teenagers and single mothers still diverge from accepted sexual norms. This has implications for national health and morality not just population pressures or scarce economic resources.; Eugenic debates about inherited sexual deviance flourished in the years 1920–45. Studying public health professionals in the early 20th century reveals how science has participated in the construction of national standards for healthy sexuality that rely on middle class definitions of morality. Knowledge of public health workers' training and how they practiced medicine uncovers assumptions about the conflation of heredity, poverty and sexual deviance that still linger unexamined in our current rhetoric about sexual normality.