Feminist eugenics

Nearly a century ago a young Austrian corporal became inspired by the vision of creating a Master Race. Once he declared himself the Führer, Adolf Hitler set out to assure the ascendancy of biologically "valuable" Germans. From 1934 to 1937 the Nazi regime sterilized an estimated 400,000 persons whom they viewed as physically and mentally unfit.

To silence his critics, Hitler justified his extermination program by invoking the scientific discipline of eugenics, a word derived from the Greek for "good birth."

Across the Atlantic, Margaret Sanger was another proponent of the burgeoning movement. A member of the Eugenics Societies in both the United States and England, Sanger penned Woman and the New Race which spelled out her utopian, if unconventional vision. [www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/chap06.html]

Laced with contempt for the female sex, Sanger wrote in 1920, "woman has, through her reproductive ability, founded and perpetuated the tyrannies of the Earth ... Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively."

Sanger's 1932 "Plan for Peace" took this analysis to its logical conclusion. She argued for the need to "apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted" and to "give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization." Sanger would later clarify that "dysgenic groups" included African-Americans.  (more...)

Feminist eugenics

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On Feminism, Eugenics and "Reproductive Rights"