Eugenics as the Foundation for Institutions
Eugenics has played a major role in the history of disability, including the institutionalization of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Eugenics, which literally means “good birth,” refers to the practice of either trying to ensure that certain people have babies (positive eugenics) or that certain people do not have babies (negative eugenics). Although ideas that fall under the umbrella of eugenicist thinking can be found in many eras, eugenics as a named field came about in the late 19th century in the writing of Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term. This was a scientific moment in which Darwinian and Mendelian genetics were being used to understand the inheritance of certain traits and characteristics in plants and animals. Galton applied this to understanding the origins of individualized difference, particularly in human behavior. Galton took the ancient practices of selective breeding in animals and applied these to humans. He encouraged able bodied, worthy people to choose partners based on characteristics that were considered “desirable.” And those individuals whose characteristics were not considered desirable would often end up in poorhouses or institutions. He also developed a theory of racial hierarchy that placed Black people as inferior to white people.
The development of eugenics allowed for the creation of institutions around the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eugenic principles were used by governments to justify practices to eliminate undesirable characteristics of those seen as “unfit” from society, such as alcoholics, prostitutes, poor people, and Black people, through compulsory sterilization or institutionalization (Roche, 2003). The mid 19th century saw the rise of “training schools” for children with what are now known as intellectual and developmental disabilities. Hervey Wilbur opened the first training school in New York, The New York State Asylum for Idiots, in Albany, in 1851 and by 1855, the school had moved to Syracuse. These training schools were established to care for, educate, and provide skills to children with intellectual and developmental disabilities so that once they left the institution they would have employable skills. However, these institutions over time became overcrowded, abusive underfunded, understaffed, and over-administered, and the purpose of the institutions morphed from education and training to inadequate care and control, abuse, and neglect, with inmates working on the institution farms, cleaning at the institution, or being hired out as laborers or maids outside of the institution, as a means for the institution to be self-sustaining, with little chance of inmates’ leaving the institution (Trent, 1994). These institutions perpetuated the segregation and marginalization of disabled people, stripping them of their autonomy and dignity.
After the Willowbrook expose and advocacy, societal attitudes toward institutions and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities evolved, many institutions began to discharge disabled people from institutions to live in communities, downsize, or close. However, the legacy of eugenics continues to impact the stigma and discrimination that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities face in society. In this exhibition, we explore the profound harm perpetrated on people with intellectual and developmental disabilities by eugenic ideology, and we also present the ways that advocates, self-advocates, and others resisted this oppression to work toward a more inclusive society that empowers disabled people to live self-determined lives.
Stiripiculture
Stirpiculture refers to the careful breeding of animals to produce special stocks, a form of positive eugenics. The Oneida Community, a religious communal society started in central New York in 1848, conducted an experiment in human stirpiculture in order to produce “beautiful children.” In this experiment, a committee chose men and women based on their superior physical, mental, and spiritual (virtuous) qualities so that they could mate and produce children who would inherit their parents’ best qualities. The experiment lasted for 10 years, from 1869 to 1879, and produced 58 children who were carefully planned and born. During the first 15 months, the children stayed with their mothers to breastfeed, and once they were weaned they were raised communally, and although relationships were encouraged, so was non-attachment.
The Oneida Community Experiment in Stirpiculture
This artifact is a history and statistical study of the results of the Oneida Community human stirpiculture experiment. This study was conducted by Dr. Hilda Herrick Noyes and George Noyes, both of whom were stirpiculture babies from this experiment. The authors noted the successful results of the experiment.
Weights of Oneida Community Babies
This artifact is from Noyes and Noyes’ study of the stirpiculture experiment. They transcribed the original records of the stirpiculture experiment, including the dates of birth, weights of the babies at various intervals, and the number of babies born in each year of the experiment. Throughout the paper, the Noyes family name is mentioned many times–John Humphrey Noyes, leader of the Oneida Community, created and controlled the partner pairings that begot the children of the Community through this experiment, and he and his son fathered 12 children between them. On the example page from the Weights of Oneida Community Babies, you can see that the last entry is for a child born on December 13, 1870 at 7 pounds 12 ounces. This baby is George W[allingford] Noyes, the co-author of “The Oneida Community Experiment in Stirpiculture.”
How To Beget and Rear Beautiful Children
Written in 1872 by James C. Jackson, the Physician-in-Chief of the Our Home on the Hillside Sanitorium in Dansville, NY, the booklet “How to Beget and Rear Beautiful Children,” rooted in eugenic ideals, provided guidance and suggestions for breeding humans like livestock, to breed out any imperfections, including disability (“sickly, ugly, malformed children,” p. 2). Jackson published many booklets on “the health of the public” that offered, for example, ways to get rid of impurities in the body through water therapy and diet.
Handicapism
This seminal text from Bob Bogdan and Doug Biklen uses “handicapism” as a paradigm to understand the social experiences of people with disability labels. Bogdan and Biklen define handicapism as “a set of assumptions and practices that promote the differential and unequal treatment of people because of apparent or assumed physical, mental or behavioral differences” (p. 4). This relates to themes of presumed competence and low expectations. If we assume we know what someone can do before we actually meet them/work with them, we can lower our expectations and therefore create a system in which people live up to our lowered expectations. This cycle helps justify the treatment that many disabled people are given. This is an example of the legacy of eugenics, that holds people with disabilities as unworthy of resources or full community participation. This article is considered one of the foundational readings in Disablity Studies.
References
Roche, C. (2022). Feebleminded white women and the spectre of proliferating perversity in American eugenics narratives. In L. Cuddy & C. Roche (Eds.), Evolution and eugenics in American literature and culture,1880-1940: Essays on ideological conflict and complicity (pp. 259–275). Bucknell University Press.
Trent, J.(1994). Inventing the feeble mind: A history of mental retardation in the United States. The University of California Press.