Critique Of Eugenic Nation By Alexandra Minna Stern

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After the fall of the Nazis in the 1940s, eugenics continued to impact the lives of those in the United States negatively up until the 1970s. It was not due to the need to be “superior”, but to be able to control reproduction by increasing the top members and decreasing the lower members. The movement took place mainly in the East Coast during the Progressive Era, reaching its climax in the 1920s and 1930s with immigration control, marriage laws, and sterilization of those who were considered dangerous to the society. Due to the Nazis, their rise to power, and the horrifying Holocaust, it had formed the movements in the United States.
The book, Eugenic Nation, is based on Alexandra Minna Stern’s belief and her very lucid piece to the improving …show more content…

Even after everything, the immigration control, marriage laws, and sterilization portion of it was disassembled about two to three decades after the Holocaust. She claims that between the 60s and 70s, “there was increasing uneasiness and anger, in streets and assembly halls, about the lingering and persistent ramifications of hereditarianism on specific groups, such as poor African American women who were being unwittingly sterilized, Mexican American youths whose life options were restricted by the results of intelligence testing and vocational tracking, and middle-class white women who were eager to finally wrest birth control out of the hands of male family planners.” (Stern) That the patriarchal society, inequality of genders, and discrimination were being attacked all around. If the concentration was not on the rise and fall of the East Coast eugenics but preferably the West Coast …show more content…

Eugenics has also reinforced the beliefs that white supremacy and Manifest Destiny began in the 19th century. Stern states that “the ‘West’ spawned metaphors and myths for the initial generation of American eugenicists, who updated the Manifest Destiny doctrines of the 1840s with a twentieth-century medical and scientific vocabulary to expound on the noble westward march of Anglo-Saxons and Nordics.” (Stern) American West was overlooked and stated that California had performed 20,000 sterilizations, one-third of the sterilization was performed in the United States, Oregon created the State Eugenics Board back in 1917, and the effect of the immigrating restriction laws along the Mexican boarders. It gave new and the modern day a reason for racial segregation and generalizations. California was in fact, home to the interlaced tripartite system where the sterilization program, anti-alien deportation policies, and psychometric research directed at youth work in concert to make a standout amongst the most extremist eugenic movements in the country and the world. The abused resources, connection with the Deportation Agents and the purging of the Great Depression were all ways where eugenicists connected the biological inferiority through the particularly novel. Due to the involvement of the Department of Institutions, the

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