Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers: ‘Women's Work’ in Biology

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 625-668

  Bix, Amy Sue ^a  

^a IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; FEMALE; HISTORY; MEDICAL GENETICS; PERSONNEL; UNITED STATES;

EUGENICS; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; RESEARCH PERSONNEL; UNITED STATES; WOMEN;

EID: 0031205554     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631297027004003     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. Garland Allen, ‘The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910–1940: An Essay in Institutional History’, Osiris, second series, Vol. 2 (1986), 225–264
2. Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985)
3. Charles Rosenberg, ‘Charles Benedict Davenport and the Irony of American Eugenics’, in Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 89–97.
4. Other sources on American eugenics include: Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963)
5. Kenneth Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972)
6. William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
7. Nicole Hahn Rafter, ‘Introduction’, in Rafter (ed.), White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919 (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 1–31, at 22. Rafter notes the dominance of women in eugenic research, but looks only at training classes through 1918, instead of the ERO course's full history.
8. Eugenical News, Vol. 4, No. 9 (September 1919), 72.
9. Charles B. Davenport, preface to The Dack Family: A Study in Hereditary Lack of Emotional Control (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: ERO Bulletin No. 15, 1916), iii–vi, and 3–46, at iv-v.
10. C.B. Davenport, ‘The Importance of Field-Work for the State of Rhode Island’, lecture notes, no date, probably 1912 (file ‘The Importance of Field-Work for the State of Rhode Island’, DP).
11. Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 10.
12. For background on women's colleges, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984).
13. For more on women's education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990)
14. Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
15. Information about college women's lives and work during these decades can be found in, among other sources, Roberta Frankfort, Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1977)
16. Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater, Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions, 1890–1940 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
17. Toby Appel, ‘Physiology in American Women's Colleges: The Rise and Decline of a Female Subculture’, Isis, Vol. 85, No. 1 (March 1994), 26–56.
18. For background history on women's education and work in biological sciences, see Gabrielle Kass-Simon, ‘Biology is Destiny’, in Kass-Simon and Patricia Fames (eds), Women of Science: Righting the Record (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 215–267
19. Ann Morgan served on Mount Holyoke's faculty from 1912 to 1947, specialized in research on water insects and zoology, and received a star in the 1932 edition of American Men of Science, marking her as one of the top thousand scientists in the nation. For her background, see Patricia Joan Siegel and Kay Thomas Finley, Women in the Scientific Search: An American Bio-bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985), 362–363.
20. For historical material on women's medical education and practice, see: Ruth Abram (ed.), Send Us A Lady Physician: Women Doctors in America, 1835–1920 (New York: Norton, 1985)
21. Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)
22. Mary Roth Walsh, Doctors Wanted, No Women Need Apply: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835–1975 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).
23. Charles B. Davenport, Huntington's Chorea in Relation to Heredity and Eugenics, based on field-notes made by Elizabeth B. Muncey, MD (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: ERO Bulletin No. 17, 1916), 195–222
24. (reprinted from American Journal of Insanity, Vol. 73 [October 1916], 195–222)
25. Davenport, The Hereditary Factor in Pellagra, and Muncey, A Study of the Heredity of Pellagra in Spartanburg County, South Carolina (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: ERO Bulletin No. 16, 1916), 1–75
26. (reprinted from The Archives of Internal Medicine, Vol. 18, No. 1 [1916]). The ERO studied pellagra in collaboration with the Robert M. Thompson-McFad-den Pellagra Commission of the New York Postgraduate Medical School and Hospital.
27. A 1919 ERO survey showed social workers earning on average $82.91 per month and eugenic field-workers averaging $81.36: Eugenical News, Vol. 4, No. 5 (May 1919), 41.
28. Examples of ERO joint authorships include: C. Davenport and A. Estabrook, The Nam Family: A Study in Cacogenics (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: ERO Memoir No. 2, 1912)
29. G.L.A.M. Cannon, and A.J.M.D. Rosanoff, Preliminary Report of a Study of Heredity in Insanity in the Light of the Mendelian Laws (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: ERO Bulletin No. 3, 1911), 1–11
30. reprinted from Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, Vol. 38, No. 5 (1911), 272–279.
31. Arthur Estabrook, The Jukes in 1915 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, publication 240, 1916).
32. Sociologist Barbara Reskin has explored the gender dimensions of such hierarchical relationships within science, writing that a ‘male scientist and his sponsor both recognize that the former usually can expect eventually to be the latter's equal’, but that female students ‘can get trapped’ into subordinate positions which ‘discourage their scientific growth and independence’: Barbara Reskin, ‘Sex Differentiation and the Social Organization of Science’, in Jerry Gaston (ed.), The Sociology of Science (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1978), 6–37, at 13–14.
33. Davenport's 1917 review of how previous ERO graduates had fared underlined the value he placed on marriage for his female students: he made special note that at least nine of the 124 single women in ERO classes had since wed, while three out of the seven formerly married or widowed had remarried, but he did not mention similar statistics for the male students: Eugenical News, Vol. 2, No. 6 (June 1917), 44.
34. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2nd edn, 1986), 219.
35. Davenport, Harry H. Laughlin, David F. Weeks, E.R. Johnstone and Henry H. Goddard, The Study of Human Heredity: Methods of Collecting, Charting and Analyzing Data (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: ERO Bulletin No. 2, 1911), 1.
36. Allen Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 123.
37. Guest lectures and clinics scheduled for the 1921 class included Dr Aaron J. Rosanoff (Kings Park Hospital) on clinical types of insanity, Dr Henry L. Taylor (New York Hospital for the Relief of Ruptured and Crippled) on his research on hereditary limb disease, Dr Walter B. Weidler (Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital) on genetic eye problems, Dr H.W. Potter (Letchworth Village) on endocrine malfunctions, Dr Clarence O. Cheney (Ward's Island) on ‘war psychoses’, and Dr George W. Mills (Central Islip Hospital) on mental pathologies: Eugenical News, Vol. 6, Nos 9 & 10 (September-October 1921),’61–62.
38. Eugenical News, Vol. 4, No. 5 (May 1919), 40.
39. Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 193–94. Students in Sanborn's 1885–88 courses visited and wrote reports on social institutions including Elmira State Reformatory, Auburn State Prison, and the New York State Asylum for Idiots, at Rochester.
40. Eugenical News, Vol. 6, Nos 9 & 10 (September-October 1921), 61
41. Philip Pauly, ‘Summer Resort and Scientific Discipline: Woods Hole and the Structure of American Biology, 1882–1925’, in Ronald Rainger, Keith R. Benson and Jane Maienshein (eds), The American Development of Biology (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 121–150.
42. Goddard gave Vineland's field-workers letters of recommendation to show people they wished to interview, documents calling the investigator a ‘personal representative’ of the institution's superintendent and ‘urging the parents, for the sake of the child, to tell all they possibly can, and to send her [the field-worker] on to other relatives or to any one who may be able to give the information, which may be used to help their child, or some one's child’: Henry H. Goddard, Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: ERO Bulletin No. 1, 1911), 1–14, at 1
43. reprinted from American Breeders Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1910), 165–178.
44. C. Davenport, The Family-History Book (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: ERO Bulletin No. 7, 1912), 55.
45. For background on the challenges and rewards of trying to combine work and personal life for women doctors around the turn of the century, see Regina M. Morantz-Sanchez, ‘The Many Faces of Intimacy: Professional Options and Personal Choice among Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women Physicians’, in Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram (eds), Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789–1979 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 45–59.
46. Eugenical News, Vol. 2, No. 6 (June 1917), 44. Davenport did not note how many male ERO students were single.
47. Charles B. Davenport, The Trait Book (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: ERO Bulletin No. 6, 1912), 1.
48. Davenport to heads of various institutions, no date, around May 1913 (file ‘ERO Eugenics Conference’, DP). Significantly, Davenport phrased this appeal in the language of scientific management and business engineering. Samuel Haber describes the early twentieth-century ‘efficiency craze’, ‘in which a gospel of efficiency was preached … to businessmen, workers, doctors, housewives and teachers, and yes, preached even to preachers’: S. Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), ix.
49. Barbara Kimmelman has explored how the language of scientific efficiency was applied to breeding improved varieties of plants and animals whjch would display greater yield and vigour: B.A. Kimmelman, ‘The American Breeders’ Association: Genetics and Eugenics in an Agricultural Context, 1903–13’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 13, No. 2 (May 1983), 163–204, at 186.
50. The ERO conferences in 1916 and 1917 appear exceptional in featuring greater numbers of papers in regular sessions by field-workers. The 1916 meeting included six papers presented by ERO-trained field-workers, five women and one man, on topics ranging from ‘The Early Development of Feeble-Minded Children’ and ‘The Use of the Family History in Out-Patient Clinics’, to the more-politically oriented ‘Sterilization in California’. The conference also included a talk on ‘Eugenics for Little Folks and Young People’ by Laura Garrett (1911 ERO class), who had become a lecturer and instructor in eugenics and sex hygiene in New York public schools, plus talks by Wilhelmina Key (1912 ERO), then employed as a psychologist at a Pennsylvania state hospital, and Dr Gertrude Hall (1911 ERO) who had become director of the Bureau of Analysis and Investigation of the New York State Board of Charities. The 1917 conference featured three talks by ERO field-work class graduates, all women, reporting on results of work at institutions where they were employed: Eugenical News, Vol. 1, No. 7 (July 1916), 48–49
51. In response to such concerns, Davenport did suggest that the women might find it ‘desirable’ always to specify that they were eugenics field-workers. By 1919, the issue of field-workers' professional status had been somewhat clarified; the ERO found that twenty out of twenty-seven institutions surveyed reported that their eugenic researchers were considered ‘members of the professional staff. Another four institutions said that their eugenic workers were ’equivalent in status to “teachers or social workers” ‘, while the other three considered Davenport's trainees ’intermediate between graduate nurses and medical interns’. The ERO maintained that eugenic field-workers would find their ‘professional status and opportunity limited only by the ability and resources of the particular worker herself or himself: Eugenical News, Vol. 4, No. 5 (May 1919), 41–42.
52. Eugenical News, Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 1916), 3.
53. Eugenical News, Vol. 4, No. 2 (February 1919), 12.
54. Eugenical News, Vol. 2, No. 9 (September 1917), 75–76.
55. Eugenical News, Vol. 2, No. 6 (June 1917), 44–45. Almost all the 258 students attended regular ERO summer sessions, but the number also included a few, again overwhelmingly female, who studied field-work with Davenport under separate arrangements.
56. Jessie Taft, The Relation of Psychiatry to Social Work’, in Virginia Robinson (ed.), Jessie Taft: Therapist and Social Worker (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), 56–63, at 57
57. (reprinted from The Family, Vol. 7, No. 7 [November 1926].
58. Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 119–120.
59. For example, the 1919 programme announced that the conference would include four papers related to the military and eugenics: A.H. Estabrook on ‘Mental Defectives in the Army’; Dr A.J. Rosanoff on ‘Neuro-Psychology in the Army’
60. Dr Carlton McDowell on ‘Eugenical Aspects of Military Devastation’
61. Davenport's own lecture on ‘The Eugenical Bearing of Venereal Disease in the Male Population of Military Age’.
62. However, Estabrook was not able to present his work because of difficulty in obtaining leave of absence from the army to attend the conference, while lack of time led to postponement of Davenport's paper: Eugenical News, Vol. 4, No. 8 (August 1919), 64.
63. The 1919 ERO Conference included talks by Madison Grant on ‘Race and Nationality’, and by Dr Louis R. Sullivan on ‘Races in the United States’. Captain Paul Popenoe spoke on ‘Eugenics and Free Love’, while Harry Laughlin presented ‘A Model Sterilization Statute’: programme for the 1919 Eugenics Research Association meeting (file ‘ERA Annual Meetings’, DP). The 1919 conference's attention to such racial, political and social issues marked a clear distinction from pre-war conferences, which had been more focused on pure research and field-work. For details on the relationship of eugenic thought to such issues as involuntary sterilization and immigration restriction, see: John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1978)
64. Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)
65. Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Reilly emphasizes Laughlin's advocacy of sterilization policies and Estabrook's testimony in the famous Carrie Buck case testing the Virginia laws.
66. Eugenical News, Vol. 6, Nos 11 & 12 (November-December 1921), 70–71