WS 400/500--Reproduction: From Eugenics to Reproductive Technology

Fall, 2004 Instructor: Laura Briggs

Tues, Thurs, 2-3:15 114A Communications

Shantz 242W lbriggs@u.arizona.edu

Office hours: Tuesday 12-1 and by appointment

Course content

What was eugenics? Did it ever really go away? These questions are surprisingly hard to answer. Feminists, progressive activists, and historians of science have addressed these questions in very different ways. The answer matters more and more as we move increasingly toward a scientific and social framework once thought discredited, that genes matter a great deal in determining the sort of people we are. New technologies raise the spectre of made-to-order babies for the very rich, while also opening up new possibilities for non-nuclear families--lesbian and gay parents, or families where “gestational” and “genetic” relatedness derive from different parents. All of this raises new questions about adoption--overseas and domestic--and how we see children and adults with disabilities. The course will examine the proposition that we need a more nuanced grammar of eugenics, genetic determinism, and reproductive technology, one that takes into account the possibility that they span the political spectrum from the hard right to the progressive left.

Required Texts

Diane Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present

Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement

course reader, available through e-reserves (PDF files)

Day-to-day business of the course

This course explores conflicting accounts of the past and present by looking at a variety of documents---newspaper articles, activist polemics, historians’ writings, medical, scientific, and professional journal articles. It will not be enough in this course for the student to follow the argument of the textbook or learn the order of events: this class will require participants to actively make sense of conflicting viewpoints. The structure of the class is that each week we will read two or three interpretive articles or book chapters alongside primary documents (usually only a few pages long) that address the subject matter of the secondary reading. In general, the readings are structured to disagree with each other and raise interesting interpretive questions.

The course will be run as a seminar, which means that most of the work of the class will happen through thinking out loud. Students are expected to be respectful of each other--even or especially when disagreeing--and to encourage and stimulate each other’s thinking. Anyone may be called on to start off the class by laying out some preliminary thoughts or questions related to the reading.

Writing is important in this course. Its goal is to enable students to develop thoughtful, original viewpoints on the social meaning and cultural position of eugenics (especially with respect to gender, race, class, and the state) and its contemporary manifestations: genetic testing and reproductive technologies. The writing in the course is designed as a way to progressively develop ideas and interpretations; re-working ideas from shorter papers into the longer ones is encouraged. The two-page reflection paper offers the opportunity to begin to work out an argument; the five-page paper should develop an argument and provide persuasive evidence for it. For the final project of the course, students will be expected to do original research on some aspect of genes and reproductive control in the twentieth century, drawing on the kinds of primary documents explored in the course (historical or scientific).

Students taking this course for graduate credit will be expected to do the additional reading (listed each week under “500”) and meet in a separate section outside the regular class meeting time. In addition, the final paper will be 10-15 pp. instead of 7-10 pp. All other requirements are the same.

Grades: Point distribution

15%-class participation

15%-one 2-page response paper

20%-one 5-page paper

5%-research paper prospectus

5%-in-class presentation of research

40%-one 7 to 10-page research paper

1890- 1945 The Era of Eugenics

What was Eugenics? More Questions than Answers

August 24: Intro

August 26: Paul, ch. 1

>>FairTest, National Center for Fair and Open Testing, “Racism and Standarized Testing--Again,” Examiner 12:2 (Spring 1998); Wade Roush, “Conflict Marks Crime Conference: Charges of Racism and Eugenics Exploded at a controversial meeting exploring the genetic basis of crime” Science 269: 2532 (29 September 1995): 1808-10.

500: Nicole Rafter Hahn, “Introduction” and Dugdale, “Jukes” in White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877-1919 (Boston: Northeastern University, 1988)

Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?

Aug 31: David Kennedy, Birth Control in America (1970), pp. 110-119; Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right; (1976) Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs (Boston: South End, 1987): 97-99.

*****“footnote chase” assignment (2 pp paper) due*****

September 2: skim Paul, chs. 2, 3

500: Carol McCann, “Birth Control and Racial Betterment,” Birth Control in the United States (Cornell, 1994): 99-134

Eugenics as Social Policy and Racial Exclusion

September 7: Paul ch. 4

September 9: Paul, ch. 5-6

>>from Lothrop Stoddard, Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (Scribner, 1920), chs. 1, 7; review by Paul Popenoe, Social Hygiene 4:4 (October 1920): 573-75.

review by Paul Popenoe, Social Hygiene 4:4 (October 1920): 573-75.

500: Martin Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 3-6, 41-80.

Progressive Eugenics?

September 14: Rich Meckel, "Better Mothers, Better Babies, Better Homes," Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850-1929 (Johns Hopkins, 1990), pp. 124-158.

September 16: Ed Larson, “Belated Progress: The Enactment of Eugenic Legislation in Georgia,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 46 (1991): 44-64.

>>Timothy Newell Pfeiffer, “The Matter and Method of Social Hygiene Legislation,” Social Hygiene 3:1 (January 1917): 51-61; “How Shall We Teach,” Social Hygiene 2:3 (July 1916): 435-39; “Is the Race Degenerating in America,” Survey 22 (24 April 1909): 137-38; Vernon Kellog, “The Bionomics of War,” Social Hygiene 1:1 (December 1914): 44-52.

500: Mark Haller, Eugenics, chs. 3, 6

Feminist Eugenics?

September 21: Laura Lovett, “Speaking the Vernacular: Florence Sherbon and the Promotion of the Family Ideal, 1915-35” (unpublished paper, 1998); Rosaleen Love, “‘Alice in Eugenics-Land’: Feminism and Eugenics in the Scientific Careers of Alice Lee and Ethel Elderton,” Annals of Science 36 (1979): 145-58.

September 23: Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State

from theSurvey

>>Amey B. Eaton, “Eugenics in America,” Survey 28 (June 3 1911): 352-54; Lillian Brandt, “Alcoholism and Social Problems,” Survey 25 (Oct 1 1910): 17-21; Katharine B. Davis, “Law Breakers,” Survey 24 (June 11, 1910): 455-57; Eleanor Wembridge, "The Seventh Child in the Four-Room House," Birth Control Review (Jan. 1924): 10-13; Alice Hamilton, "Poverty and Birth Control," Birth Control Review (August 1925): 226-28.

500: Amy Sue Bix, “Experience and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers: ‘Women’s Work’ in Biology,” Social Studies of Science 27 (1997): 625-68.

Non-US Eugenics

September 29: Nancy Leys Stepan, "Racial Poisons and the Politics of Heredity in Latin America in the 1920s," The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Cornell, 1991), pp. 63-101; Donna Guy, "The Pan American Child Congresses, 1916-1942: Pan Americanism, Child Reform, and the Welfare State in Latin America," Journal of Family History 23:3 (July 1998): 272-91.

October 1: Robert Proctor, "The Destruction of 'Lives Not Worth Living'" Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Harvard, 1988), 177-222.

>>Domingo Ramos Ocampo, "Homiculture in its relation to eugenics in Cuba," Proceedings of the International Conference on Eugenics, 2nd session, (New York, 1921); "Final Record of Proceedings of the First Pan American Conference on Eugenics and Homiculture," Actas de la Primera Conferencia Panamericana de Eugenesia y Homicultura de las Republicas Americanas (Havana, 1928).

1945 to 1980: Objections, Retreat, Status Quo

Eugenics after the war: “Retreat” or Stasis?

October 5: William Provine, “Geneticists and Race,” American Zoologist 26 (1986): 857-87.

October 7: Paul, ch. 7

>>UNESCO Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences (1951, 1950); Genetics Society of America, Resolution on Genetics, Race, and Intelligence, 1976, JAMA quote

500: Kevles, ch. 11, 12, 13, pp. 164-211

*************5 pp paper due October 7************

Left and Feminist Anti-Sterilization, Anti-Eugenics, Anti-Population Control Politics

October 12--Nelson, intro., ch. 1

October 14--Nelson, ch. 2

>>SNCC, "Genocide in Mississippi"

500: Briggs, "Eugenics and the Reproductive Rights Politics of Civil Rights Movements"

October 19: Nelson, chs. 3, 4

October 21: Nelson, chs. 5, conclusion

>>Toni Cade, "The Pill: Genocide or Liberation" in Cade, ed. The Black Woman

500:

Adoption

October 26: Rickie Solinger, “Choice is a Moving Target,” in Beggars and Choosers (2001): 3-36.

October 28: Dorothy Roberts, from Shattered Bonds, pp. 3-55.

>>Anonymous, “Renting Wombs” Antipode 34:5 (November 2001): 864-873.

500: David Eng, “Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas,” Social Text 76 (Fall 2003): 1-38.

November 2: Election Day, no class. Go vote, phone bank, hold signs for your candidate.

Genetic Screening

November 5: Marsha Saxton, "Disability Rights and Selective Abortion" in Rickie Solinger, ed., Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950-2000 (Berkeley: University of California, 1998): 374-394.

ReproTech: Creating Human Thoroughbreds and Victimizing Women?

November 9: Valerie Hartouni, “Breached Birth: Anna Johnson and the Reproduction of Raced Bodies” in Cultural Conceptions: On Reproductive Technologies and the Remaking of Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997):85-98.

November 11: Veteran’s Day, no class.

>> POV: “Baby, It’s You”

***********Preliminary research proposal due*************

Contemporary Controversies: Abortion and Breast Cancer, Stem Cells

November 16: from April Huff, Questioning Authority: The Science and Politics of the Abortion-Breast Cancer Debate

November 18: Janet Doglin, “Embryonic Discourse,” Issues in Law and Medicine19:3 (Spring 2004): 203-65.

500: TBA

November 23: Research paper proposal due

November 25: no class. Happy Thanksgiving

Transnational ReproRights Politics

November 30: Soheir Morsy, “Biotechnology and the Taming of Women’s Bodies,” in Processed Lives (1997): 168-72.

December 2: Marcia Inhorn, The "Local" Confronts the "Global": Infertile Bodies and New Reproductive Technologies in Egypt,” in Marcia Inhorn and Frank van Balen, Infertility around the Globe (2002)

500: TBA

The Last Word

December 7 in-class presentations of research

December 14: 10 pp research paper due in my box in Comm 108, no exceptions