“Most Americans of middle age or older,” Jean Bethke Elshtain observes, “have heard of Jane Addams. Didn’t she have something to do with immigrants and social work?” Founder of Hull-House, the pioneering Chicago settlement house inspired by a Christian impulse to “share the lives of the poor,” extraordinarily influential among young women as a model of what women could accomplish, defender of the immigrant and advocate for children, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize, Jane Addams has largely slipped from public consciousness since her death in 1935. In a new book, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life, Elshtain brings Addams vividly into focus and shows why her life and work are profoundly relevant to the challenges Americans face at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Herewith an excerpt.
In 1915, Otis Tufton Mason, then curator of the Department of Ethnology in the United States National Museum, published Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture. This text provided scholarly confirmation of views that Jane Addams already held about the centrality of women’s role in the creation and maintenance of culture. Mason’s book appeared in 1915; although Addams had been expounding views consistent with Mason’s well before that date, his book bolstered her convictions.
The overriding theme limned by Mason is that women did not languish in the backwater as men charged forth to create culture and make history; rather, if one looks at the world of primitive culture (by which he means cultures prior to written languages and with a tribal structure of one sort or another), one finds women food bringers, weavers, skin dressers, potters, beasts of burden, jacks-of-all-trades, artists, linguists, founders of society, and patrons of religion. The “founders of society” category is especially important in light of the fact that the dominant Western political tradition features only male founders of polities. Mason, however, gestures toward female foundings. He believes there is substantial anthropological and paleontological evidence that women were the creators of settled social life. This thesis belied then-ascendant Social Darwinism, with its accounts of societal origins in a brutal survival of the fittest.
By contrast, and in light of his evidence, when Mason sees women pass before him, he sees not “an abject creature. … the brutalized slave of man,” but a creature whose ability to do almost everything helped to create a “higher law of culture. … the law of co-ordination and co-operation.” Women were inventors. Women domesticated animals. Women were the cultural carriers of weaving and of textiles in general—and this is a vital dimension of civilization. Women harvested what nature offered and invented orderly cultivation. They were the “first ceramic artisans and developed all the techniques, the forms, and the uses of pottery.” Women were the first to “conceive the idea of shelter for herself and her helpless infant.” Women invented dyes and the arts of decoration; women linked necessity—protecting the body—to beauty. Lastly, the mother-child pair was the first linguistic unity.
Because motherhood requires stability, women were the primary agents of stable matrimony—an enormous advance for civilization and for women themselves. Women were prophetesses and mourners. They helped create religion. Women were teachers and friends. They had “their share in determining the relation of geography to history, in the conquest of the three kingdoms of Nature, in the substitution of other forces to do the work of human muscles, in the elaboration of industrial aesthetic arts, in the creation of social order, in the production of language, in the development of religions.” Surely, Mason argues, the progress of civilization and of “intellectuality” should not be “opposed to childbearing.” Indeed, if such a sentiment becomes prevalent, a society is doomed. For both pedagogy and the body politic had their origins in female-generated activity.
This is a sharp alternative to accounts of human origins that stress the hunt, including, as I have already noted, the heady cruelties of Social Darwinism with its mapping of “nature red in tooth and claw” onto human social life.1 Although Addams was an evolutionist and familiar with Darwin’s account of competition within and between species, she drew her conclusions instead from sources that, like Mason’s book, advocated the view that the primordial tasks of women were essential creations of culture. Not only was she an opponent of Social Darwinism in her own day; her views also place her in a tradition of thought that fell into disrepute with the demise of the social feminism she advocated and the triumph of an individualist version of feminism in the past quarter century.
What Addams seems to have glimpsed is a form of power that doesn’t have as its means violence and doesn’t have as its end total control and command. She had long been searching for that ever-elusive female authority, the right and the power not only to speak but also to act. She confronted a conundrum: that women have been both powerful and powerless. But it seemed that—at least, for much of history—the forms of power that women wielded and the areas of human life in which they had their say did not grant women the right to speak afforded to men, which flowed to men by virtue of the form of power they exercised and the arenas over which they had effective control. Certainly women have not been uniformly and universally downtrodden, demeaned, infantilized, and coerced. Women have not, however, been afforded the authority of men. The new woman of Addams’s age was well advised to seek the source of authority in new versions of women’s historic strengths. For, just as Addams had recognized that “there is power in men,” so power is to be found in women’s history.
Every culture holds an image of a body politic. What Addams insists upon is that the female body—most importantly, the maternal female body—is the central image of social generativity and fecundity. Clearly, one need not be a mother in the biological sense—although she found this the most vital of all human activities—in order to locate oneself within this image. This body politic is not the classical notion of a kingdom or king’s domain. It is, instead, a vision that locates “familied contexts” and “communities of everyday belief and action that regenerate political education without subordinating people.” Could Chicago be that sort of body politic, with its stockyards, sweatshops, and tenements? There was a fighting chance, if woman-power and authority as a civic ideal available to all came to prevail.
Municipal Housekeeping, Whose Time Has Come
In 1903, a bill was introduced in the Michigan legislature that provided for the electrocution of infants with mental infirmities—no doubt inspired by the eugenics craze that was then sweeping the United States. Electrocution was quick and didn’t involve suffering, or such was the claim. By extension, what better way to rid society of “imbeciles” than to do it quickly and tidily at birth?2 For reaction to this proposed piece of legislation, prominent persons were polled, Jane Addams among them. She is quoted as saying: “The suggestion is horrible. It is not in line with the march of civilization nor with the principles of humanity. The Spartans destroyed children physically infirm. Are we to go back to the days of Sparta? Feeble-minded children are one of the cares of a community. It is our duty to care for them. Such a bill surely cannot be passed in this country of enlightenment.”3
Addams surely believed that women would be less likely to promote such a policy than men. Why? Were women morally superior? No, not that, but women, with their hands-on primary responsibilities for children, before and after birth, could not treat “imbeciles” as a generic category the world is best rid of: or so Addams devoutly believed. Addams tells story after story of mothers devoted to their “feeble-minded” offspring. It is clear, at times, that she has some reservations about the toll this takes on the poor women and their families. But the answer is not to destroy those with special needs, it is for the community to pitch in to help. Given her commitment to make the world less violent and cruel, the “feeble-minded” and “mentally deficient” (these words were standard usage in her day, and by no means considered epithets) must come under a capacious civic and ethical umbrella. That is part of municipal housekeeping.
In a commentary on “The Home and the Special Child,”4 Addams indicates her support for, but caution about, experts making judgments about the needs of “special children”—a point that had been argued by the previous speaker on a panel on which she sat. Addams asserts: “It is difficult for a parent to make a clear judgment in regard to his own child, especially in respect to the child’s mental or moral capacities. But, if parental affection clouds the power of diagnosis, at the same time, after the diagnosis has been made by the trained mind, parental affection enormously increases the power of devotion which is necessary to carry out the regimen which the trained mind has laid down.” Bowing toward the trained expert without stripping parents (and the mother is central here) of their authority in relation to their child, Addams notes that in going through a socially sanctioned process of child-study and diagnosis, the parent realizes the child is “not an exception” and loses “his peculiar sensitiveness in regard to his child. The reaction of this change of attitude upon the entire family is something astounding.” She then links this process to one of her standard briefs against self-pity, the notion that one is “so isolated,” that one (or one’s child) is “an exception.” Parents thus convinced go through a process like this:
You think you have a child unlike other children; you are anxious that your neighbor shall not find it out; it places you and the normal children in the family in a curious relation to the rest of the community; but if you find out that there are many other such children in your city and in other cities thruout the United States, and that a whole concourse of people are studying to help these children, considering them not at all queer and outrageous, but simply a type of child which occurs from time to time and which can be enormously helped, you come out of that peculiarity sensitive attitude and the whole family is lifted with you into a surprising degree of hopefulness and normality.
She proceeds with a number of anecdotal tales from her own experience that illustrate the extraordinary difference it makes when having a “special child” becomes ordinary, “simply a type of child which occurs from time to time.” Only when mothers are freed from a “sense of isolation,” when they discover that “there were many other people who had children of that sort who were not thereby disgraced,” when “the community recognized such children and provided for them,” and needed the mother’s cooperation in this—then and only then can that which is broken be somewhat repaired. Jane Addams didn’t win this battle; the era of massive institutionalization was upon the country. But she helped create what might be called a countertradition, another way of doing and thinking, which one day bore fruit. In lecture after lecture, newspaper article after newspaper article, interview after interview, she stressed the theme of municipal housekeeping as a type of applied morals (her characterization) and as a mode of analysis.
The phrase municipal (or civic) housekeeping is easily misunderstood and dismissed: it seems to imply that politics can be replaced by housekeeping on a grand scale. No doubt some social reformers had precisely that in mind, but Addams was not so naÏve. Indeed, she taxed the doctrinaire socialists of her day for the ideological naÏvetÉ they exhibited concerning the anticipated glories of the socialist future. She recalled how one ardent socialist during the course of the weekly Hull-House drawing-room discussions held under the auspices of “The Working People’s Social Science Club” had declared that “socialism will cure the toothache.” A second interlocutor, not to be outdone, upped the ante, insisting “that when every child’s teeth were systematically cared for from the beginning, toothache would disappear from the face of the earth.”
Even as she deplored fanaticism and the notion that nothing is more important than the right theory, she opposed politics as violence and resolutely refused to glamorize social unrest. Episodes like citywide strikes may be exciting to some, but they turn a town into “two cheering sides” as if one were a spectator at a sporting event. Fair-mindedness goes down the drain. Her quest for balance, and for a politics that best fits the quotidian norm a social democracy should embody, takes expression frequently as a determination to mitigate. She and Hull-House and similar settlements would mitigate a situation. We rarely use the term nowadays in this way, but she has in mind to make milder and more gentle; to render anger and hatred less fierce and violent; to relax the violence of one’s action; to alleviate physical or mental pain; to lighten the burden of an evil of any kind; to reduce severity; to moderate to a bearable degree.
The politics of a socialized democracy was concerned with precisely this kind of mitigation. Addams understood the importance of politics; hence the key role she played in seconding the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt as the candidate of the Progressive Party for president in 1912. She made hundreds of speeches in behalf of her candidate, stumping to the point of physical breakdown. She appreciated that electoral politics was a central feature of American life. But why should something as basic to the well-being of a city as garbage collection be a matter of political influence, deal-making, and contestation?
City Housekeeping As Experimentation
Why not be experimental, for what is a settlement if not “an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city,” she had written in Twenty Years at Hull-House. Municipal housekeeping was an experiment. Look at the situation closely. Study it. What do you see? You cannot help but observe that most of the departments in a modern city “can be traced to woman’s traditional activity.” Two points must be made. The first is that it makes no sense to disallow women to vote on matters that so directly concern them. The second is that in light of their traditional activities, women possess the insights and expert (if informal) knowledge needed by cities in order to deal with the manifold problems that have emerged in the overcrowded immigrant city: insanitary housing, poisonous sewage, contaminated water, infant mortality at alarming rates, the spread of contagion, adulterated food, impure milk, smoke-laden air, ill-ventilated factories, dangerous occupations, juvenile crime, unwholesome crowding, prostitution, and drunkenness. In times long past, when the city was a citadel, it may have made sense that “those who bore arms” were the only group “fully enfranchised.” Addams writes: “There was a certain logic in giving the franchise only to grown men when the existence and stability of the city depended upon their defense, and when the ultimate value of the elector could be reduced to his ability to perform military duty.”
But cities no longer settle their claims by force of arms. Instead, the city depends upon “enlarged housekeeping.” No “predatory instinct” serves us here, nor does “brute strength”—not when one is dealing with “delicate matters of human growth and welfare.” Is it not possible that the city has failed to keep house properly “partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities”? Addams stresses that “ability to carry arms has nothing to do with the health department maintained by the city which provides that children are vaccinated, that contagious diseases are isolated and placarded, that the spread of tuberculosis is curbed, that the water is free from typhoid infection.” Addams argues for a new civic humanitarianism in which women not only can but must participate:
Because all these things have traditionally been in the hands of women, if they take no part in it now they are not only missing the education which the natural participation in civic life would bring to them, but they are losing what they have always had. From the beginning of tribal life they have been held responsible for the health of the community, a function which is now represented by the health department; from the days of the cave dwellers so far as the home was clean and wholesome it was due to their efforts, which are now represented by the bureau of tenement house inspection; from the period of the primitive village the only public sweeping which was performed was what they undertook in their divers dooryards, that which is now represented by the bureau of street cleaning.
Simple logic and the aspiration to political education all combine to urge upon women and all others municipal housekeeping. Addams speculates on two possible effects, if women get the municipal ballot. The first is an “opportunity to fulfill their old duties and obligations with the safeguard and the consideration which the ballot alone can secure for them under the changed conditions and, secondly, the education which participation in actual affairs always brings. As we believe that woman has no right to allow the things to drop away from her that really belong to her, so we contend that ability to perform an obligation comes very largely in proportion as that obligation is conscientiously assumed.”
Jane Addams’s argument, straightforward in its assessment of the problems and a way to meet them head on, is also subtle in its recognition that much of woman’s political innocence, which appears as moral goodness, derives from the fact that women haven’t had the opportunity or the power to do many of the things—including the horrible and dubious things—that men, who have had both power and opportunity, have done. So if one could “forecast the career of woman, the citizen,” it is that she, too, must “bear her share of civic responsibility not because she clamors for her rights, but because she is essential to the normal development of the city of the future.”
To an extraordinary degree, Chicago’s women had already rolled up their sleeves and tackled the host of problems Jane Addams enumerates. She was intertwined from the beginning of Hull-House—indeed, even before its beginning—with networks of powerful, influential, and civically engaged women. They provided financial backing. They lobbied powerful men—in many cases, their own husbands. They went public with their concerns. They worked indefatigably. This was volunteer activity, not only because many of the women were well-to-do but because they were responding to a deeply ingrained call to service. But they were frustrated by the limits they encountered repeatedly, and were no doubt pained as well as chagrined by the fact that they were not allowed to vote even in municipal elections. Typically, Addams ties the municipal ballot for women to a very practical set of concerns. But she goes on to link women suffrage as a general proposition to the insistence that women must discharge their civic duty, which they cannot do while separated from the ballot.
In a pamphlet entitled “Why Women Should Vote,” penned in 1915, Addams charges contemporary women with failing to “discharge their duties to their households properly simply because they do not perceive that as society grows more complicated it is necessary that woman shall extend her sense of responsibility to many things outside of her own home if she would continue to preserve the home in its entirety.” Life in a crowded city quarter affords the meticulous housekeeper no sanctum sanctorum. She may scrub day and night; dust around the clock; close the blinds and shutters (assuming she has windows and can occasionally see sunlight); but the meat she puts on the table may nonetheless be tainted, the drinking water surging with bacteria, and the winter overcoats and cloaks bearing contagions from the sweatshops. Addams educates women who represent many languages and traditions but who share a common concern for the well-being of their children, to understand in what that well-being now consists:
In a crowded city quarter. … if the street is not cleaned by the city authorities—no amount of private sweeping will keep the tenement free from grime; if the garbage is not properly collected and destroyed a tenement house mother may see her children sicken and die of diseases from which she alone is powerless to shield them, although her tenderness and devotion are unbounded. She cannot even secure untainted meat for her household, she cannot provide fresh fruit, unless meat has been inspected by city officials, and the decayed fruit, which is so often placed upon sale in the tenement districts, has been destroyed in the interests of public health. In short, if woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying quite outside of their immediate household. The individual conscience and devotion are no longer effective.
Addams illustrates this point with a parable from chapter 13 of Twenty Years at Hull-House: “The Story of the Self-Sacrificing Mother’s Spotless House, All in Vain.” Addams begins by recalling the typhoid fever epidemic of 1902, in which the 19th Ward, “although containing but one thirty-sixth of the population of the city, registered one sixth of the total number of deaths.” Hull-House residents had “made an investigation of the methods of plumbing in the houses adjacent to conspicuous groups of fever cases.” She continues:
They discovered among the people who had been exposed to the infection, a widow who had lived in the ward for a number of years, in a comfortable little house of her own. Although the Italian immigrants were closing in all around her, she was not willing to sell her property and to move away until she had finished the education of her children. In the meantime she held herself quite aloof from her Italian neighbors and could never be drawn into any of the public efforts to secure a better code of tenement-house sanitation. Her two daughters were sent to an eastern college. One June when one of them had graduated and the other still had two years before she took her degree, they came to the spotless little house and to their self-sacrificing mother for the summer holiday. They both fell ill with typhoid fever and one daughter died because the mother’s utmost efforts could not keep the infection out of her own house. The entire disaster affords, perhaps, a fair illustration of the futility of the individual conscience which would isolate a family from the rest of the community and its interests.
Addams may be a bit rough on the self-sacrificing mother here, but she has a point to make, so she permits herself some heavy-handedness. Participation in municipal housekeeping aimed at helping to keep everyone’s children safe is the best shot at protecting your own children. You can bar the door, but germs do not knock before they enter. Don’t turn your back on housewifely duties, Addams argues, but extend their purview. You are in part responsible for the condition of the streets, the food, the drinking water, even the schools. You can lobby for playgrounds or watch kids harm themselves or even run afoul of the law through playing in busy city streets or train yards.
Jane Addams knew that much of the work of culture lay in the creation of the boundaries that make free activities possible. But when those boundaries constrict and strangle, when they fairly asphyxiate the patient, it is time to take decisive action. Much of the activity of Hull-House over the years involved pushing boundaries to include people who had been excluded, as well as extending boundaries that were too restrictive in other ways. “Home extension,” some have called it. Optimistically, Addams believed that both the family claim and the social claim would be ennobled in this dynamic process; that neither need lose. As she notes in the biography of her friend, Hull-House resident Julia Lathrop (a distinguished figure in her own right):
Even in the very first years of Hull-House we began to discover that our activities were gradually extending from the settlement to a participation in city and national undertakings. We found that our neighborhood playground, the very first in Chicago, was not secure until it became part of a system covering the whole city; better housing was dependent upon a good tenement house code for which we had worked against many obstacles through the City Homes Association.
The Garbage Wars
The problem of garbage was typical of the many problems in the 19th Ward caused by the lack of political responsiveness to serious public issues. In many cases the lack of responsiveness was due to extensive corruption, or “boodling,” as it was called, which lined the pockets of a few but did not clean the streets for the many. One of the more remarkable early Hull-House stories is that of how Miss Jane Addams, in 1894, became the first woman appointed sanitation inspector of the 19th Ward. The problem of garbage was severe. Sidewalks, where they existed, were buried under many feet of compacted refuse. Immigrants reared their families in its stench, with vermin as their ever-present companions. Activities in the immigrants’ world were severely circumscribed according to gender. There were male- and female-defined activities and spheres of movement, with the woman’s being inside the home (despite the number of young girls, unmarried women, widows, and deserted, divorced, and single mothers who were compelled to work outside the home) and the man’s outside the home. Garbage was far too low a thing for men to tend to routinely—it seemed an extension of the household—but no single household could possibly deal with mountains of it. So it was a municipal task. But the city wasn’t doing its job, because of sloppiness and political corruption.
Those who insisted that garbage was each family’s own business assumed that so long as you sweep out or dispose of your own, you’ve fulfilled the applicable ethical code, that of the household. But this represents a disaster for the whole. A civic ethic must be brought to bear. That is why corrupt city housekeeping is such a problem. To correct the problem, it isn’t so much a matter of salting the entire city apparatus with squeaky-clean social reformers as, instead, working as hard as one can to ensure that those who take on civic tasks—even chores as humble yet necessary as garbage collection—realize their importance to the whole and see that their efforts are a vital part of the wider challenge to make the city more livable and more beautiful.
Addams’s appointment as sanitation inspector came only after a protracted battle between Hull-House and Alderman Johnny Powers, a popular “boodler” who delivered turkeys at Thanksgiving but who was indifferent to the garbage problem despite the mounting evidence of disease and the much higher than average death rates, including infant mortality, in the 19th Ward. Hull-House launched a campaign to unseat Powers and to bring in a reform candidate (who presumably would not reward a Powers loyalist with the garbage inspector appointment). Hull-House received some backing for this effort from prominent businessmen, and it submitted a bid to the city council in the hope of being awarded the garbage-collection contract. In the first round, Hull-House’s bid was thrown out. But the effort generated a flurry of citywide publicity: the Hull-House ladies versus the flashy, smooth, and popular Mr. Powers. The upshot was that “Major George Swift, a reform-minded Republican,” decided to “appoint her [Addams] garbage inspector for the 19th Ward—the first woman to hold the $1,000 a year job.”
So Addams and another Hull-House resident began the odorous if not onerous task of traipsing along after garbage collection teams to make certain that the task was completed to their satisfaction. The Chicago newspapers made much of this, but Addams’s own telling of the tale in Twenty Years at Hull-House is circumspect (if reminiscent of Charles Dickens in its detail). One sees the “huge wooden garbage boxes” that little children played on and in, the “decayed fruit and vegetables discarded by Italian and Greek fruit peddlers,” the “residuum left over from the piles of filthy rags which were fished out of the city dumps and brought to the homes of the rag pickers for further sorting and washing.” Many living in the neighborhood got used to the foul smells, and those living farther away were unaware of the increasingly dangerous situation. For more than three years prior to Addams’s appointment, the Hull-House residents had complained of these conditions. They had encouraged their neighbors to join them in the effort to obtain redress. But only slight modifications had occurred, and the conditions “remained intolerable.”
Addams tells us that by her fourth summer at Hull-House she was “absolutely desperate” because her “delicate little nephew, for whom I was a guardian, could not be with me at Hull-House at all unless the sickening odors were reduced. I may well be ashamed that other delicate children who were torn from their families, not into boarding school but into eternity, had not long before driven me into effective action. Under the direction of the first man who came as a resident to Hull-House we began a systematic investigation of the city system of garbage collection.” The Hull-House Women’s Club was drummed into service, with 12 Irish American clubwomen working to investigate conditions in the alleys. At the end of their investigation, the women reported to the health department all of the violations they had observed and recorded: a total of 1,037. One can well imagine the effect this veritable mountain of disastrous information had on the health department chief, accompanied as it was by accusations of city inaction in the face of mounting death rates, especially among children, in the 19th Ward.
Addams praises the clubwomen who “had finished a long day’s work of washing or ironing followed by the cooking of a hot supper” and for whom “it would have been much easier to sit on her doorstep during a summer evening than to go up and down ill-kept alleys and get into trouble with her neighbors over the condition of the garbage boxes. It required both civic enterprise and moral conviction to be willing to do this three evenings a week during the hottest and most uncomfortable months of the year.” But they persisted.
A settlement is always led, Addams insisted, from the concrete to the more abstract. You must try to see the relation of the small thing to the whole. She illustrates this point with a story about the tailors’ union that met at Hull-House, which once sought the help of the residents there in “tagging the various parts of a man’s coat in such wise as to show the money paid to the people who had made it.” By the time one added the costs of “salesmen, commercial travelers, rent and management” to those of cutting, buttonholing, finishing, and other aspects of the job, the poor “tagged coat was finally left hanging limply in a closet as if discouraged by the attempt.” But this desire to “know the relation” of one’s “own labor to the whole is not only legitimate but must form the basis of any intellect action” for improvement. You must start with the particular, even though you can’t end there.
Jean Bethke Elshtain is Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago. This article is excerpted from her newly published book, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy. Copyright 2001 by Jean Bethke Elshtain. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books. All rights reserved.
1. Interestingly, Darwin, unlike many Social Darwinists, does not draw from his account of origins the conclusion that there should be rank inequalities, racial divides, and all the rest. We are, he insists, “one species, so there is absolutely no reason why the world’s population cannot operate in sympathy and harmony.” The Origins of the Species (Modern Library, 1990), p. 244.
2. It is difficult to imagine what the legislators who proposed this measure could have been thinking. A mini-electric bed on which to place and to execute defective newborns in every delivery room? The image is so grotesque as to be stomach-churning. Thomas Edison himself had demonstrated the glories of electrocution by electrocuting an elephant. A grainy old film exists showing the great elephant being led to a special stand. The elephant is wired up. A switch is pulled. The great creature totters, smoke curls up, its knees buckle, it is felled.
3. In this “country of enlightenment,” of course, persons with mental retardation or mental illness or even epilepsy, on the basis of sloppy diagnoses (or no diagnosis at all, in many cases), were shunned and institutionalized. The United States Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell sanctioned the practice of involuntary sterilization of “imbeciles.” Nowadays, diagnostic procedures are deployed prior to birth in order to promote the abortion of “defective” fetuses. The entire medical profession is geared in this direction; although the language of choice is, of course, “choice,” women who have gone through the experience report having felt the pressure to abort.
4. National Education Association Journal of Proceedings and Addresses (1908), pp. 1127-1131.
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