Eugenic Past, Eugenic Present: On Audrey Farley’s “The Unfit Heiress”
Twentieth-century America was mad for eugenics. Scientists sought to “remake the world” by culling the “waste humanity” from the rest of the prize-winning herd. Wealthy philanthropists who wrung their hands about overpopulation funneled money into eugenic programs. Comfortable middle-class families delighted in being lionized as the ideal American specimens, quietly watching as the working-class immigrant family down the street was discouraged from having children. Eugenics was so embedded in the fabric of American society that not even the wealthy white heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt could escape it when, at the age of 20, both of her fallopian tubes were removed without her knowledge or consent.
Ann’s story of forced sterilization and its dramatic aftermath unfolds in Audrey Clare Farley’s new book “The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt” (April 20, Grand Central Publishing). When Ann went into the hospital for an appendectomy, her mother, Maryon, took the opportunity to pay Ann’s doctors to take her fallopian tubes as well, claiming she was mentally unfit. In the 1930s, such claims alone were sufficient grounds to strip women of their bodily autonomy and keep them passing any degenerate traits to another generation. When Ann discovered she would never have children, she took her mother and the doctors who carried out her wishes to court.
Cover to The Unfit Heiress, The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt. Grand Central Publishing, 2021. Fair Use.
For Ann, her suit against her mother was a personal matter, alleging Maryon had arranged the secret sterilization to prevent Ann from coming into her fortune at age 21. Ann’s deceased father, inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt, had stipulated in his will that only one-third of his estate would go to Maryon whereas two-thirds would go to Ann—but only if Ann had children. Otherwise, the entire estate would go to Maryon. As personal as the case was for Ann, many others had a stake in its outcome. Mayron couldn’t have succeeded in her plan if eugenic systems and principles weren’t already in place to support it. By extension, the scientists and doctors who supported eugenics saw their pet project on trial alongside Maryon.
Throughout the book, it becomes clear that Farley isn’t necessarily interested in a salacious tale of rich white women airing their dirty laundry in public. Rather, she keenly investigates the culture of eugenics that surrounded and pervaded both Ann’s life and court case. As Farley shows, this court case would “spark a nationwide debate of the changing nature of womanhood, the purpose of sexuality, and the merits of allowing doctors to decide who did and didn’t reproduce.”
As a wealthy white woman, Ann doesn’t seem like the typical target for eugenic forced sterilization. Farley rightly points out that Black women, immigrant women, and poor women were usually singled out for such state-sanctioned violation in order to keep them from passing on unfavorable genetic traits. If these women could be kept from reproducing—and wellborn white women were encouraged to bear more children—the social ills of poverty and criminality, treated as biological traits, could be eliminated in just a couple generations.
But Ann presented another existential threat: an “over-sexed” woman. At age 3, she was diagnosed with “arrested mental development” after she had been caught masturbating. (This is a completely normal behavior for children that age, by the way). Then while living in a “home for feebleminded children,” she fell asleep in a boy’s bed while listening to him tell a story, scandalizing the nurse who found her the next morning. From the perspectives of her mother and doctors, Ann was an incurable degenerate with troubling sexual appetites and “man-like urges.”
Farley explains that Ann’s “urges” tapped into Euro-American fears about the “New Woman” of the 20th century—a woman who worked, rode a bicycle, and worst of all, had sex just for fun. A society obsessed with good offspring feared that over-sexed women may never marry and create more white babies, all while Black, Asian, and Eastern European women would continue on; the future of the white race was at risk. Promiscuity in women was a rejection of their duty as wives and mothers, and this too had to be kept from seeping into future generations. Against this backdrop of moral panic, it was easy for some to see Ann’s sex life as grounds for her unfitness to bear or raise children and, ultimately, her involuntary sterilization.
Between 1907, when Indiana passed the first eugenic compulsory sterilization law in the world, and the 1960s, over 64,000 people in the U.S. were sterilized. Most were institutionalized women. Even at the midway point in the 1930s, some scientists had begun to turn away from eugenics, realizing inheritance is much more complicated than a science experiment about growing peas. How the science was being used against the Jewish people in Germany was also starting to raise alarm.
When Ann’s case went public in 1936, eugenics’ chief defenders, Paul Popenoe and Ezra Gosney—founders of the Human Betterment Foundation and personal inspirations to a man who crafted the Nazi Nuremberg Laws—followed the case with interest. They were delighted when, ultimately, the judge dismissed the case against the doctors, saying the prosecution brought no solid proof of conspiracy to keep Ann from her inheritance, even if the defense made a case of Mayron’s history of abusive behaviors toward Ann. Furthermore, since sterilization was legal in California, no criminal wrongdoing had occurred. Even though this dismissal was rather benign compared to the landmark 1927 Buck v. Bell case, which legitimized U.S. eugenic sterilization laws, the ruling expanded sterilization in more subtle, insidious ways.
In the case of Carrie Buck and others deemed mentally unfit, a family tree illustrating inherited “degeneracy” was grounds for compulsory sterilization. Ann’s mother didn’t produce a family tree for the doctors to justify Ann’s sterilization—and as Farley argues, by finding no wrongdoing on the part of the doctors, the judge in Hewitt’s case set precedent to “lessen the burden of proof to demonstrate a woman’s unfitness for motherhood.” This gave doctors license to sterilize women who they deemed “reckless breeders” without any proof, even grossly biased ones like family trees. And if Maryon was as abusive as Ann’s defense claimed, well, then perhaps it was best if Ann didn’t have children herself in such a toxic family. Eugenics had now shifted away from defective genes to social environments, effectively distancing the practice from the race-based sterilization programs of Germany.
Ann eventually dropped the case against her mother, and they both gradually drifted out of the public eye, which was more focused on the tabloid-esque nature of the story than the ethics of eugenics. But Farley continues on, following the profound repercussions of Ann’s case through 1970s Los Angeles, where dozens of Latina women were sterilized either without their knowledge or through coercion. Because Ann’s case lessened the burden of proof needed for sterilization, the individual doctors who carried out the sterilizations did so at their own discretion. As Farley points out, these doctors and others who performed sterilizations didn’t see themselves as eugenicists because, to them, they weren’t targeting Latina women: they were targeting the problem of overpopulation. With the case for bad genes now out of the mainstream, eugenicists had found other ways to package and sell eugenics.
The most indicting feature of Farley’s book is not America’s eugenic past but America’s eugenic present. The U.S. never became Hitler’s Germany, but only because Americans got so good at hiding what they were doing. Well after the Holocaust had ended and laws governing informed consent had been formalized in medical practice, the U.S. government continued to fund sterilization programs across the country under the guise of combatting poverty and overpopulation, even though the victims continued to be Black, Indigenous, and Latina women. In prisons to this day, incarcerated women are coerced into tubal ligations or bribed with birth control in exchange for lower prison sentences under the pretense that it’s for their own good.
We don’t live on the ruins of eugenics; we live within it, twisting its language when the talk of “race” and “genes” is no longer publicly popular. This is a reality that many institutions, scientists, and everyday people in the U.S. have not reckoned with. In drawing a throughline from past to present, Farley forces readers to do so.
Image credit: Eugenics Society Poster, 1930s (Wikimedia Commons | CC BY 4.0)
