In the United States, "feeblemindedness" became a catchall diagnosis deployed by advocates of forced sterilization.
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Such individuals have historically been known as both "holy fools" and "blessed fools". The term "fool" connotes what is perceived as feeblemindedness, and "blessed" or "holy" refers to innocence in the eyes of God.Frith, Uta. (1989) Autism: The Elegant Enigma.
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In Nazi Germany many people were forced into sterilization by Nazis who believed in race purity and their right to enforce it. Between 1933 and 1945 roughly 15,000 deaf people were forced into sterilization. The youngest victim being only 9 years old, nearly 5,000 children up to the age of 16 were sterilized. Deaf children were forced to sterilization for reported hereditary deafness or feeblemindedness.
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" Howe and his eugenicist colleagues sought to craft legislation that would pass constitutional muster. They believed that blindness, as a hygienic trait, would be an easier target for eugenics legislation than such "defective" traits as "feeblemindedness" or a family history of poverty. Howe's own eugenics activism targeted more than blindness. He also proposed requiring a large cash bond from any marriage license applicant suspected of being "unfit.
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Boudreau 2005: At the time, it was believed that certain behavioral qualities were inherited from one's parents. This led to the addition of several judging categories including: generosity, self-sacrificing, and quality of familial bonds. Additionally, there were negative features that were judged: selfishness, jealousy, suspiciousness, high-temperedness, and cruelty. Feeblemindedness, alcoholism, and paralysis were few among other traits that were included as physical traits to be judged when looking at family lineage.
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Sadler argued that alcoholism and "feeblemindedness, insanity, and delinquency" were hereditary traits and that those who possessed them were breeding at a much faster rate than "superior human beings". He feared that this issue could threaten the "civilization we bequeath our descendants". He also believed that the majority of criminals were mentally ill. In 1907, Sadler began giving lectures on the Chautauqua adult-education circuit, which featured itinerant speakers discussing self- help and morality.
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She attended public school until the sixth grade. After that, she continued to live with the Dobbses, and did domestic work in the home. Carrie became pregnant when she was 17, as a result of being raped by the nephew of her foster parents. To hide the act, on January 23, 1924, Carrie's foster parents committed the girl to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded on the grounds of feeblemindedness, incorrigible behavior and promiscuity.
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Intrigued, Varla hatches a scheme to rob the old man, and the three women follow him back to the ranch, with their captive in tow. At the ranch they encounter the old man, his younger son (who they learn is called "The Vegetable" due to his feeblemindedness) and his elder son, Kirk. The group all have lunch together, and Billie taunts Rosie when Varla leaves with Kirk, hoping to seduce him into revealing the location of the money.
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During his time at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Davenport began a series of investigations into aspects of the inheritance of human personality and mental traits, and over the years he generated hundreds of papers and several books on the genetics of alcoholism, pellagra (later shown to be due to a vitamin deficiency), criminality, feeblemindedness, seafaringness, bad temper, intelligence, manic depression, and the biological effects of race crossing. Additionally, Davenport mentored many people while working at the Laboratory, such as Massachusetts suffragist, Claiborne Catlin Elliman.
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She attended public school, where she was noted to be an average student. When she was in sixth grade, the Dobbses removed her to have her help with housework. At 17, Buck became pregnant as a result of being raped by Alice Dobbs' nephew, Clarence Garland. On January 23, 1924, the Dobbses had her committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble- Minded on the grounds of feeblemindedness, incorrigible behavior, and promiscuity. On March 28, 1924, she gave birth to a daughter, Vivian.
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The Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases not only affected deaf individuals, but also those with other disabilities including mental deficiency, schizophrenia, hereditary epilepsy, blindness, physical disabilities, congenital feeblemindedness, and even severe alcoholism. The deaf were reported to the authorities by their families, peers, teachers, and doctors. Children in deaf schools were often taken by authorities, and even some of their teachers, to be sterilized unknowingly and without consent. Some were forced to undergo sterilization even if there was proof that they could give birth to “healthy” children.
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In the 1910s, Vaughan gave lectures at the university on the subject of eugenics. He believed that individuals exhibiting the "defective unit characters" of "alcoholism, feeblemindedness, epilepsy, insanity, pauperism and criminality" should be excluded from the "privilege ... of parenthood". He spoke in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1914 at a statewide conference sponsored by the Race Betterment Foundation, a center of the eugenics movement that had been co- founded by the cereal magnate John Harvey Kellogg. Vaughan served on the organization's central committee, and was also serving as president of the state health board.
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She was "retained in 2A" for the next > term – or "left back" as was formerly said, and scarcely a sign of > imbecility as I remember all my buddies who suffered a similar fate. In any > case, she again did well in her final term, with B in deportment, reading, > and spelling, and C in writing, English, and mathematics during her last > month in school. This offspring of "lewd and immoral" women excelled in > deportment and performed adequately, although not brilliantly, in her > academic subjects. By all accounts Vivian was of average intelligence, far above feeblemindedness.
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In this regard, it is noteworthy that shortly before his death, Eulenburg wrote that the only woman he ever really loved was his mother. Röhl wrote: "It is now generally recognised that people cannot be classified as either hetero- or homosexual...Instead there were various intermediate stages between these extremes into which Philipp Eulenburg and some of his friends surely fitted...Such fine distinctions perished, however in an intellectual climate in which, following the teachings of the Heidelberg psychiatry professor, Emil Kraepelin, 'contrary sexual proclivities' were classified along with 'idiocy', 'cretinism', and 'congenital feeblemindedness' as a form of 'lunacy'".
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Robert N. Proctor has shown that the list of illnesses which the law targeted included "feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, genetic blindness, and "severe alcoholism."" The estimated number of citizens who were sterilized in Nazi Germany ranges from 350,00 to 400,000. As a result of the Sterilization Law, sterilization medicine and research soon became one of the largest medical industries. Young Rhinelander who was classified as a bastard and hereditarily unfit under the Nazi regime Racial hygienists played key roles in the Holocaust, the German National Socialist effort to purge Europe of Jews, Romani people, Poles, Serbs (along with the majority of the other Slavs), Blacks, mixed race people, and physically or intellectually disabled people.
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In 1948 as part of continuing statewide efforts to limit "feeblemindedness" and improve the population, the Stonewall Jackson Training School was the site of sterilization by vasectomy of six teenage white males, in operations authorized by the state Eugenics Board. Most sterilizations were performed on girls and women rather than boys or men. North Carolina was one of the last states that continued to perform sterilizations on people under state care.John Railey and Kevin Begos, "DETOUR: In '48 state singled out delinquent boys", JournalNow/Winston-Salem Journal, 2002, accessed 8 Jan 2009 During the decades of its existence, the School was criticized for abuses common in many detention facilities, such as overcrowding and prisoner violence. At its peak the facility held about 500 youths.
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Reed told the Senate that earlier legislation "disregards entirely those of us who are interested in keeping American stock up to the highest standard—that is, the people who were born here." He believed that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, most of whom were Catholics or Jews, arrived sick and starving, were less capable of contributing to the American economy, and were unable to adapt to American culture. Eugenics was used as justification for the act's restriction of certain races or ethnicities of people to prevent the spread of perceived feeblemindedness in American society. Samuel Gompers, himself a Jewish immigrant from Britain and the founder of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), supported the act because he opposed the cheap labor that immigration represented even though the act would sharply reduce Jewish immigration.
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In the 1920s and 1930s, members of the Eugenics Society advocated for graded Family Allowances in which wealthier families would be given more funds for having more children, thus incentivizing fertility in the middle and upper classes. Statistician and EES member R. A. Fisher argued in 1932 that existing Family Allowances that only funded the poor were dysgenic, as they did not reward the breeding of individuals the EES viewed as eugenically desirable. In 1930, the Eugenics Society formed a Committee for Legalising Sterilisation, producing propaganda pamphlets touting sterilisation as there solution for eliminating heritable feeblemindedness. During this time period members of the Society such as Julian Huxley expressed support for eutelegenesis, a eugenic proposal to artificially inseminate women with the sperm of men deemed mentally and physically superior in an effort to better the race.
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