Session Abstract - Wendy Kline

Session Abstract - Wendy Kline

Teaching Eugenics: The Story of the Sonoma State Home for the “Feebleminded”
 

Argument:

The eugenic strategies implemented at the Sonoma State Home in California – segregation and sterilization – dramatically increased the influence and popularity of negative eugenics in America.  The story of the home can be used as a case study to educate students about the role of eugenics in America’s history.

Summary:

My remarks focused on the history of the Sonoma State Home for the Feebleminded, where in 1942, according to one expert, more eugenic sterilizations were performed on “mental defectives” than in any other institution in the world. This episode illuminates the impact of negative eugenics on the institutional level, and explains the movement’s growing influence as it moved from segregation to sterilization strategies. The story of the Sonoma Home – its patients, practitioners, methods, and policies – dramatizes the sweeping transformation of mental deficiency from a treatable disease to a sexually loaded, gender-specific, permanent condition requiring either life-long institutionalization or sexual sterilization. 

Founded in 1884, the Home was originally an institution for the education and training of mentally disabled children, “to fit them, as far as possible, for future usefulness.” But after the emergence of eugenics in Progressive-era America, Sonoma changed radically.  Between 1910 and 1920, the inmate population increased by over fifty percent (making it the fastest-growing public institution in the state), and the largest new “type” targeted for incarceration was the female “high-grade moron.” [1]

This dramatic institutional growth and the emphasis on female sexuality underscores the conflation of race and gender anxieties in eugenic ideology, explaining why female moral offenders would be housed in an institution for the “feebleminded.”  Henry Goddard’s “moron” diagnostic category linked mental deficiency with moral deficiency, thereby suggesting that immoral behavior was dysgenic and would lead to race suicide.  Hence, anxiety about working-class female sexuality was channeled into anxiety about the “menace of the feebleminded.”

Though the history of the Sonoma State Home for the Feebleminded is in itself a dramatic and powerful example of the coercive potential of the Progressive-era state institution, its significance extends beyond the history of institutions in America.  For eugenicists and moral conservatives in California and throughout the world, Sonoma served as a laboratory where strategies for analyzing and controlling female sexual and reproductive behavior – even outside of the institution – were tested.  Segregation and sterilization gained world-wide legitimacy as a result of their use at Sonoma.  The Human Betterment Foundation (1926-1942), which promoted sterilization as a highly effective and successful eugenic procedure in California, publicized the writings and records of Sonoma’s patients, doctors, and social workers in its popular literature, thus helping to convince other states and several European countries to implement eugenic sterilization laws.  Strategies most effective in regulating female sexual and moral behavior – in particular, sterilization – gained legitimacy as Sonoma’s patients, parolees, and discharges were touted as scientific evidence of the efficacy of eugenics in negotiating a new, reproductive morality.



                [1] State Board of Charities and Corrections, Biennial Report (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1922), 49.