When nurse Dawn Wooten blew the whistle on medical staff at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia last fall, she reported that dozens of female detainees had been involuntarily sterilized at the privately-run immigration prison.
It was a shocking allegation, reminiscent of medical abuses that many of us assumed were relics of a bygone era.
Sadly, however, these abuses have persisted into the twenty-first century, and Wooten’s revelation cast a bright light on the intersection of racism, sexism, and xenophobia.
Today’s religious right grew out of the eugenics movement.
Audrey Clare Farley’s The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt provides the political and historical context for this intersection. It zeroes in on the early- to mid-twentieth century eugenics movement—a once mainstream effort to perfect society by keeping “the unfit” from reproducing—by highlighting the story of Ann Cooper Hewitt, whose mother, Maryon, conspired to have her sterilized after a doctor declared her mentally defective in a bold—some would say unconscionable—attempt to take her daughter’s share of an inheritance.
Farley’s description of Cooper Hewitt’s effort to sue her mother, as well as the doctors who classified her as a “moron” and performed surgery to remove her Fallopian tubes, makes for gripping, unsettling, reading.
I recently spoke with Farley about the book in a far-reaching conversation over Zoom.
Q: How did you learn about Ann?
Audrey Clare Farley: I’d been researching the history of insulin, which was invented in 1921, because my daughter is diabetic and, as I read about this period, I discovered that diabetics had largely been excluded from eugenicists’ involuntary sterilization campaigns. I found that curious, so I read everything I could find on the eugenics movement. I eventually read about Ann and the story really impacted me. I was fascinated by what a sensation she’d caused, but her situation was also interesting on an intellectual level.
Q: Did you ever find out why diabetics were not targeted for sterilization?
Farley: Intellectual disabilities were considered more dangerous than physical disabilities because a “feeble-minded” woman was thought more likely than a physically disabled woman to cross the color line. Intellectual disabilities were seen as a bigger threat to white supremacy. Also, diabetes was erroneously thought to afflict mostly middle and upper class whites—exactly the people eugenicists wished to see reproduce.
Q: You describe The Unfit Heiress as a work of creative nonfiction in the author’s note. What did your research involve and what liberties did you take?
Farley: My research involved a lot of reading, including many academic books about eugenics, sexuality, and the prevalent cultural attitudes of the first half of the twentieth century. I also read extensive news coverage about Ann’s case. There was actually an incredible amount of material in the tabloids. They were great fun to read so I spent eight to ten hours a day immersed in them and learned not just about the courtroom battle, but about Ann’s dad, Peter Cooper Hewitt, and about her mother.
This gave me a firm factual foundation. But I felt that I had to take some liberties when it came to crafting dialogue. In most cases, the dialogue had been summarized in the press so it was not hard for me to imagine what had been said. I also took liberties when I felt that I had to offer an explanation for why something happened.
For example, when Ann forgave her mother and decided not to pursue the criminal case against her, I had to hazard a guess about why she did this. My feeling was that she bonded with Maryon because both had been so thoroughly trashed by the media; Ann understood how deeply wrong this was.
Q: Why did eugenics have such a hold on society and gain such broad acceptance?
Farley: The late 1800s were an extraordinary moment for science, and some religious communities—mostly liberal Protestants—broke from other Christians in supporting science. They did not see Darwinism as at odds with faith and argued that religion and science could coexist. It was also a time when many Christians were focused on earthly progress. Under the influence of postmillennialism, they believed that Jesus would not return to earth until 1,000 years of peace and prosperity had been achieved. Liberals who subscribed to this idea felt it was their responsibility to do what they could to abolish crime and poverty. They saw eugenics as a way to perfect the world.
The reproductive justice movement has broadened the focus on reproductive issues to include forced sterilization and childcare, in addition to abortion and birth control.
On the other hand, Catholics thought sterilization was intrinsically evil. Evangelicals opposed it because they saw Darwin as the bogeyman and were exclusively focused on the afterlife and being saved. They felt that when the Rapture came, the world would be forsaken. At the same time, evangelicals supported some aspects of the eugenics movement, like anti-miscegenation laws and restrictions on immigration.
Q: You draw a straight line between eugenics and the so-called New Right, in particular James Dobson’s Focus on the Family.
Farley: Today’s religious right grew out of the eugenics movement. James Dobson’s mentor was eugenicist Paul Popenoe, who is an important figure in the book. Their relationship was documented by Popenoe’s son. While Popenoe was an atheist and Dobson put everything in Biblical terms, the two shared the same worldview.
Grace Farley
Audrey Clare Farley
After the 1930s, Popenoe’s focus shifted from forced sterilization, which was being discredited, to bolstering heterosexual marriage and the traditional family. He wanted to eliminate barriers to white reproduction, such as pornography, masturbation, and homosexuality. He opened the American Institute of Family Relations, counseling couples and training clergymen (many Baptists) to do the same. He strongly opposed interracial marriage, but had counselors use coded language such as “compatibility.”
Dobson served as Popenoe’s assistant at the Institute before founding Focus on the Family in 1977. Like Popenoe, he believed in male authority, opposed interracial marriage, and fretted about rising immigration and non-white reproduction. In ranting about inner-city, out-of-wedlock Black births, he pretended the issue was moral, not racial, while simultaneously presenting patriarchal marriage as the solution to poverty.
Q: Let’s talk about Ann’s case. Did the public sympathize with her?
Farley: Briefly. After she filed the case against her mother and the doctors, many sympathized with her. But once Maryon got out in front of the story to say that Ann was “over-sexed,” that she threw herself at men, including “negroes,” and had been declared a “moron” by a reputable psychologist, the media started to present Ann negatively, and by the time the judge dismissed the case against the doctors, no one even bothered to protest the decision on Ann’s behalf.
Q: The case was filled with twists and turns, including a suicide attempt by Maryon. Do you see this as manipulation, or did she feel some remorse for what she had done to her daughter?
Farley: I see Maryon’s attempt to end her life as an attempt to escape infamy and a life of poverty. Had Ann won the case, the suit would have bankrupted her and it was highly unlikely that she would have been able to “marry up” for a sixth time because of the negative publicity. Nonetheless, there is some evidence of a change of heart. Right before she died, she phoned Ann, but Ann never returned the call. She had also been offered a lot of money to write a tell-all book, but she didn’t do it.
Q: How did you feel toward Ann?
Farley: Ann had my heart. I cared about her in a deep way. I sympathized with her because she spent her life chasing after the kind of unconditional love she’d gotten from her father before he died. Still, I knew that she’d done something terrible to at least one other woman, so she was complicated.
Q: The fact that sterilization abuse continues to happen is horrifying. Do you have any insight into how we can organize to end it once and for all?
Farley: The reproductive justice movement has broadened the focus on reproductive issues to include forced sterilization and childcare, in addition to abortion and birth control. They’re waging this campaign against a backdrop of opposition to racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.
But a lot more needs to be done to bring attention to the issue. I am heartened that what happened at the Irwin Detention Center was made public and is being challenged in court and hope that the legal system provides some justice to the women who were sterilized without their consent.