Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  The civil rights struggles that began in the 1940s were galvanized by what African Americans and other minority groups perceived as a gaping and hypocritical disjuncture between the nation’s promise of equality and the harsh reality of racism, particularly as endured during World War II.30 Civil rights and student organizations were concerned with many interlocking issues including housing, employment, transportation, and voting rights. Challenging such institutions often implied ridding the American landscape of the remnants and reinventions of eugenics. For example, Mendez v. Westminster, a class action suit against a Southern Californian school district that had served as a laboratory for the California Bureau for Juvenile Research’s IQ testing programs, can be understood partially as an attempt to rectify the ramifications of eugenic racism in California’s public education system.31 Even though segregation was ruled unconstitutional in this instance and the “separate but equal” law was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 in the twin cases of Hernandez v. Texas and Brown v. Board of Education, these decisions did not fundamentally alter many of the underlying tenets of racial classification in American society. To some extent, racial ideologies were deepened, not undermined, by the turn to population and family planning, which shored up “culture of poverty” and family pathology models of race and social difference, especially with regard to reproduction and parenthood. Furthermore, when hereditarianism was rearticulated along the lines of sex, gender, and biotypology during the Cold War, it became integral to what second-wave feminists and reproductive rights activists identified as some of the most offensive dimensions of modern sexism: marriage counseling, a pronatalism driven by confining gender norms, and virtually no authority or ability to either definitively choose or reject available means of birth control.

  Mexican Americans launched their civil rights struggle during World War II, forming organizations such as the American G.I. Forum and the Mexican American Political Association, in addition to working hand in hand with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In the 1940s, a decade marked by rising concern over juvenile delinquency in American cities, these coalitions fought against stereotypes of Mexicans, especially Americanized male adolescents, as either mentally deficient or criminally prone. Such depictions circulated with intensity in Southern California during the 1943 Sleepy Lagoon Trial, in which twenty-four Mexican-origin boys were indicted for the alleged murder of one man. An influential report produced for the trial by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office argued that Mexicans committed disproportionate crimes because of their racial status as unstable and volatile mestizos, a biological fact that Mexican American community organizations and their allies were “loathe to admit.”32 In a letter forwarding this report to Walter White at the NAACP, a representative from the Pan American Council on Democracy, which supported the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, decried the permissibility of such reasoning in the courtroom: “[I]t will shock you. Never to our knowledge has there been a more unvarnished exposition of Hitler’s theory of race supremacy in this country.”33

  Given that Los Angeles was a critical hub of American eugenics in the 1940s, it is not surprising that the caricatures of Mexicans as diseased and degenerate that were common in the 1920s and 1930s persisted after the war. Moreover, even when updated, such portrayals still often relied on notions of bad or corrupted breeding. Emory Bogardus, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, a member of the AES (1927–1935), and a trustee of the American Institute of Family Relations, wrote prolifically on the predicament of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in midcentury. Like many other postwar eugenicists, by the 1940s Bogardus was averse to blanket assertions that Mexican youth were “descended from ‘bad’ ancestry” and genetically wired to become criminals: such claims “ran counter to anthropological knowledge.” Notwithstanding his recognition of the debilitating socioeconomic circumstances faced by many Mexicans, Bogardus still recurred to heredity, suggesting that the children of Mexican migrants, especially if poor, were most likely born “subnormal” and that their low IQs were likely the result of inbreeding.34

  It was not until the 1960s and 1970s, with the self-identification of a new generation that called itself Chicana/os, that the underpinnings of such stereotypes were systematically unraveled. A crucial piece of this critique concentrated on the implications of the ongoing use of IQ and aptitude tests to classify and track Mexican students. In the 1930s, the Mexican American educator George I. Sánchez had pilloried IQ tests for their many drawbacks.35 Trained in educational psychology and president of the League of United Latin American Citizens from 1941 to 1942, Sánchez perspicaciously criticized the National Intelligence Test and the Stanford-Binet, inveighing against strict hereditarianism and race psychology. Nevertheless, he did not recommend that IQ tests be relinquished, but instead that they be cautiously employed as barometers of social and linguistic assimilation.36 In the 1970s, Chicanos pushed Sánchez’s analysis a few steps further. This decade saw a flurry of counterstudies that denied the validity of IQ and aptitude tests and traced how psychometrics, even after having taken language, class, and educational access into consideration, had demoted and diminished Chicanos for decades.37 For example, in its third issue in 1970 the journal El Grito, published in Berkeley, carried an editorial applauding a recent court decision that mandated bilingual testing in California, and stated simply “for generations the intelligence testing of Mexican-American children has caused untold harm.” In looking back to the origins of the label “mentally retarded,” the editor pinpointed a 1923 study that had set the precedent for racial discrimination by advancing “the definite notion that Mexican and Indian children suffered from a severe case of ‘bad blood.’ ”38 To begin to address the vast educational discrepancies in the American West, one Chicana scholar recommended “a change in the whole approach to testing and the evaluation of IQ tests,” while another was more skeptical about such pedagogical reform: “[T]here is also the alternative of doing away with I.Q. testing altogether.”39

  In 1968, Mexicans comprised 40 percent of those tracked into programs for the “mentally handicapped” in California even though they constituted only 14 percent of the state’s elementary and secondary students.40 Not surprisingly, the Los Angeles school system, which had been a stronghold of eugenically inspired research into the 1940s, was one of the first targets of emboldened young Chicanos. In the spring of 1968 thousands of high school students affiliated with United Mexican American Students stormed out of their classrooms in East Los Angeles in a chain reaction of “blowouts” demanding curriculum revisions, reduced class size, expanded bilingual programs, Mexican American teachers, and in short more community jurisdiction over primary and secondary education. While marching to the school board to present their grievances, these young protestors shouted, “Chicano Power!” and carried signs exclaiming, “Education, not Eradication,” and “We are not ‘Dirty Mexicans.’ ”41

  More broadly, Chicana/os swept back through the twentieth century, cataloguing the myriad ways scientific and social scientific theories had contributed to representations of them as lazy, stupid, childish, and inclined toward drug addiction and thievery.42 This analysis was accompanied by the creation of mental health categories and services that Chicano/as defined from within their own communities.43 In general, the (re)assertion of ethnic and racial identity during the 1960s was often expressed in terms of gaining ownership and control over one’s own body as an aesthetic, psychic, and physical entity.44 Health and healing often figured prominently in this politics of corporeal reappropriation. For example, the Black Panthers, the Chicano Brown Berets, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords all opened up community health centers in places such as Los Angeles, Oakland, and New York City.45 Along these lines, Chicano activists convened a conference in New Mexico in 1972 to begin to address the particular needs of Mexican-origin patients in the United States.46 The previous year, Chicano health practitioners—physicians, nurses, and medic
al students—founded the National Chicano Health Organization (NCHO) to promote culturally sensitive care and devise strategies to increase the number of Mexican American practitioners.47 On a more fundamental level, this was a period in which medical authority, interpreted as patriarchal and repressive, came under attack from many quarters including ethnic nationalists, feminists, and gay and lesbian liberationists, as well as from some radicalized medical students and nurses.48 For example, in the early 1970s disabled college students, intent on disentangling themselves from what they perceived as infantilized and constrictive relationships with doctors, psychologists, and other experts, spearheaded the independent living movement, establishing their first center in Berkeley in 1972.49

  LIBERATING THE SEXUAL BODY

  When Paul Popenoe read The Feminine Mystique in 1963, he may have sensed an eerie familiarity with the universe of housewives, mothers, and caretakers described by Betty Friedan.50 It was, after all, just the remedy the doctor had been prescribing for more than thirty years: wives channeling their “ego outlets” into wholesome hobbies, marriage at a younger and younger age, nuclear families with daughters enrolled in the Brownie Troops and sons in the Boy Scouts, and an implicit recognition of the deep-seated and unalterable differences between women and men. Where Popenoe saw a harmonious utopia that would guarantee the survival of the human species and civilization, however, Friedan witnessed a nightmare—an unspeakable emptiness that was gnawing away at middle-class American women, who were ensnared in a relentless cycle of empty daily routines. After ruminating on the “problem that had no name,” Friedan began to see in “a strange new light” what was behind the baby boom: female frigidity, despondency, and depression, and the many “character pathologies and sexual problems being reported by the doctors.”51 Although focused on white suburban housewives, The Feminine Mystique opened a wedge for the articulation of the resentment and dissatisfaction of millions of American women and began to craft a language for second-wave feminism.

  Friedan blamed the circumscribed and unfulfilled life of the housewife largely on Freudian theories, which insisted on reading women’s problems, frustrations, and neuroses as psychosexual maladies, not as the result of the suffocation of human potential through the enforcement of motherhood, marriage, and child-rearing.52 Akin to Friedan, most second-wave feminists held up Freud as the effigy that needed to be burned. Nevertheless, when women’s liberationists railed against the expectations of femininity that they found so oppressive and degrading, they were also rebuking the pronatalism, family planning, and mate selection that had been promoted by eugenicists since the 1940s. Reading the incendiary and evocative tracts of second-wave feminists, it is hard not to see Paul Popenoe, “Mr. Marriage,” standing right beside Freud as an as yet unacknowledged accomplice.

  For more than forty years, Popenoe and the AIFR, which he founded and directed, had translated family-centric eugenics into daily counseling, influencing the lives of thousands of Americans. Through AIFR pamphlets and Popenoe’s syndicated columns—above all his long-running “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” which appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal—women were taught that “biologically the individual was made for marriage” and that women’s evolutionary and social calling was to listen to their husbands, try anything to keep the marriage together, and even tolerate emotional and physical abuse.53 Popenoe, and other eugenicists who extrapolated on the centrality of family and marriage in the pages of Eugenics Quarterly and similar publications, merged demographic imperatives, psychoanalytic terminology, and a rudimentary form of sex-gender hereditarianism to turn out a version of better breeding that resonated powerfully with the Cold War apotheosis of home and hearth. This reconfigured eugenics helped to prepare the stage for the profamily climate of the 1950s, a story borne out by the numbers. From the a low of 18.4 per 1,000 in the 1930s, for example, births increased to a high of 25.3 per 1,000 in 1957, and the average number of children per family rose from 2.4 to 3.2. Additionally, the rate for third children doubled, and for fourth children, tripled. The divorce rate plummeted and, by the mid-1950s, men were marrying as early as age twenty-two and women at twenty.54

  When Friedan issued her clarion call, she intended to subvert the strictures of domesticity and the veneration of women as mothers and helpmates, and was responding to the insinuation of Freudian notions of “penis envy,” clitoral infantilism, and vaginal frigidity into the lives and bodies of middle-class American women.55 She was also, however, dissecting the crude biologism that continued to inform dominant ideas about gender difference and acceptable gender behavior. Shortly after it was published, Popenoe reviewed The Feminine Mystique; he dismissed its “shrill and excited tone,” calling it a “Jeremiad, with little supporting evidence.” Popenoe was particularly irked by Friedan’s assertion that a woman could attain self-fulfillment only by transcending her reproductive function as breeder. For Popenoe, this message smacked of the race suicide of white middle-class America: “It is obvious that, in general, the home must be given first place in the life of both men and women—otherwise the survival of a nation is endangered. Beyond that, it is imperative that the ablest women, who can create the best homes, also bear and rear a fair proportion of the nation’s children—otherwise leadership will gradually die out.” Popenoe’s answer to the malaise-afflicted housewife profiled by Friedan was to find enjoyable hobbies and make her home “the center, not the periphery, of her life.” Furthermore, he opined that The Feminine Mystique should be read as a muffled plea to instruct imprudent women on becoming more “efficient as homemakers.”56

  The divergence between Popenoe and Friedan foreshadowed the ruptures that would surface later in the decade as second-wave feminists began to attack marital counseling, the concepts of frigidity and the vaginal orgasm, and personality testing. Since the 1940s, male medical or psychological experts, who were now enemy number one, had championed all of these. Although second-wave feminists lashed out at the entire enterprise of marital advice, first and foremost as featured in women’s magazines, they reserved special wrath for Popenoe. Since 1953, Popenoe had offered practical advice for distraught wives (and a few husbands) in “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” which drew from actual cases of AIFR clients. The column presented scenarios of conflict and miscommunication between spouses, which were resolved through some form of self-scrutiny or self-assessment, in which the troubled individual, invariably the wife, grasped how she could repair the marriage and improve as a person. One of the defining moments of women’s liberation was March 18, 1970, when Media Women, a loosely knit coalition of feminist collectives, staged a sit-in at Ladies’ Home Journal. Outraged at the LHJ’s depiction of women as merely wives, consumers, and sex objects, more than one hundred feminists marched into the magazine’s headquarters and occupied the offices of its editor, John Mack Carter. They brought with them a detailed list of demands, ranging from the hiring of a female editor in chief, to free day care, substantial raises for all staff, and the removal of all exploitative and degrading advertising. In addition, they insisted that LHJ “cease to publish the advice column ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ ”57 In her memoir, which traces the overlaps and tensions between second-wave feminism and lesbian liberation, Karla Jay, who participated in the Media Women action, explains one of the reasons LHJ was singled out: “The magazine featured advice columns, including one entitled ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ It was patently offensive: No matter how brutal or demeaning the circumstances a woman faced in her marriage, she was advised to stick with it, be more compliant, and become more caring. Sometimes the columnist proffered advice on making a woman’s husband a bit nicer, but women were generally expected to make any necessary adjustments themselves. The obvious question ‘Should this marriage be saved?’ was never raised.”58

  In It Ain’t Me Babe, a short-lived magazine produced by one of the hundreds of feminist groups that sprouted up across the country in the late 1960s, an author who identified herself simply as Gina derided the
paternalism of the LHJ in general, and “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” in particular. She dissected the moral of one of Popenoe’s marital fables. In this column, Tessa, a wife with two small children, was reduced to begging for sex and affection from her aloof husband, Tom, a successful businessman. One night, when Tessa and Tom were finally making love, the phone rang, interrupting them and leaving “Tessa on the brink of orgasm” as Tom rushed out the door to pursue a lucrative deal. Gina ridiculed Popenoe’s suggestion that Tessa should recognize that her agitation stemmed from her own insecurity and that she could only attain greater happiness by showering Tom with more love and encouragement, which, as an exemplary breadwinner, he rightly deserved. Gina deemed this kind of advice so blatantly demeaning as to stimulate the “ire of women who seek freedom and full personhood.”59

  If second-wave feminists excoriated marital counseling, they also radically reinterpreted one of its standard diagnoses: frigidity. During the Cold War era of domesticity, women who shunned men, rejected their sexual advances, were uninterested in procreation, and failed to achieve vaginal orgasm were labeled frigid. At the AIFR, marriage counseling headquarters U.S.A., the condition of frigidity had been ascertained since the early 1940s through the administration of temperament tests. If a woman’s score on the Johnson Temperament Analysis Test placed her in deviation zones for traits such as Cold (as opposed to Cordial) or Critical (as opposed to Appreciative), she was deemed frigid, perhaps a man-hater, and either coached to absorb the lessons of self-help manuals or perform vaginal contraction exercises. For women’s liberationists, frigidity and the vaginal orgasm were two of the most destructive myths perpetuated by the phallocentric advice industry. In her cataclysmic 1968 essay, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” Anne Koedt, informed by the sex research of Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, recentered female sexuality on the clitoris. For Koedt, the fixation on the vagina was a result of women being “defined sexually in terms of what pleases men.” She implored women to take charge of their own biology and “redefine our own sexuality. We must discard the ‘normal’ concepts of sex and create new guidelines which take into account mutual sexual enjoyment.”60