The Foundling

At the end of the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the eugenics movement became extremely popular. Sir Francis Galton coined the term in 1883, and it ostensibly refers to improving society by increasing desirable traits in the population while decreasing undesirable traits. In practice, eugenics involves encouraging certain people to produce more children while preventing others from reproducing, often through forced sterilization or other forms of violence. Eugenics has been discredited as a science and especially lost favor in legitimate scientific communities after the Nazis adopted a doctrine of eugenics to justify the extermination of Jewish people, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, Slavic people, and other marginalized groups. However, eugenics practices persisted in the United States into the 1970s through forced or coerced sterilizations of Puerto Rican, Black, and Indigenous women, as well as women with disabilities or mental health conditions. Notable supporters of the eugenics movement were Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, and Margaret Sanger.

Proponents of eugenics used health and empowerment rhetoric, asserting that preventing the births of babies with traits that they perceived as burdening society was good for mothers and society at large. In practice, the eugenics movement was grounded in racist, classist, xenophobic, and anti-gay beliefs. While the birth control movement empowered women to have agency over their own bodies, birth control methods were also forced on women without their consent. By linking undesirable and criminal behaviors with mental health conditions and disabilities, the eugenics movement also justified institutionalizing and sterilizing people who did not fit into social standards.

Poor women and women of color were especially targeted by the eugenics movement. Behaviors such as having a child out of wedlock, sex work, or being a lesbian were deemed criminal. Judges would require these women to take IQ (Intelligence Quotient) tests. IQ tests were adopted from French psychologist Alfred Binet, who developed it to measure the intelligence of French children, by Henry Goddard, a leader on the eugenics and forced sterilization movement. The IQ test was biased and included questions that a test-taker would know only if they had a particular type of Western education. Women could also be institutionalized by their husbands, fathers, or brothers. If a woman did not listen to the patriarch in her family, had sexual relations outside of the marriage, or participated in behavior that was deemed improper, a man could convince a judge to incarcerate her in institutions like Nettleton in The Foundling. Girls as young as 12 were held captive in these institutions until they were no longer of childbearing age, which could be up to 50 years if they entered the institutions as teenagers, and were forced to work on farms, in factories, as maids, and in other professions for free. In other words, poor women and women of color were subject to extrajudicial institutionalized slavery for non-crimes.