I knew the name Carrie Buck mainly as the Buck part of Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court case that upheld Virginia's 1924 eugenical sterilization law. It's hard to forget Oliver Wendell Holmes' declaration, "Three generations of imbeciles is enough." That judgement sealed the fate of Carrie Buck and 65,000 other Americans. I knew that there had been organizations actively promoting eugenics in the United States during the earlier part of the twentieth century. Our eugenics groups paralleled similar organizations that were emerging in Europe, notably in Germany, at that time. Eugenics has long since been discredited and, I confess, I didn't give Carrie Buck much thought. I concerned myself far more with subjects that appeared to still be in dispute.
Never having looked into the details of the case, although I deplored the program of sterilization, I didn't question the essential assumption that Carrie Buck was, in some manner or another, intellectually or emotionally impaired. If I thought about it at all, it was in terms of abstract principles. I never asked what caused the government to believe she, in particular, was someone who needed to be forcibly sterilized.
So, why did I think of Carrie Buck yesterday evening as I was getting ready to go to sleep? It was Hungry Coyote's diary and the reason why Carrie Buck had been committed to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded at the age of seventeen. She was pregnant as the result of a rape.
This fact has been haunting me since I read about it a couple of months ago in Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People.
As it turned out, Carrie Buck represents an all too common case of personal vulnerability. At about age eight, she had been placed in a foster home. Some years later a member of that family raped her. Pregnant as a result of the rape, she was sent to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded to be sterilized as soon as she gave birth. Primitive, haphazardly administered Stanford-Binet intelligence tests rated her and her mother as imbeciles, but as an adult, Carrie showed no signs of impairment. Against a backdrop of degenerate-family studies demonizing poor white people, Carrie Buck's sterilization had resulted from sexual abuse, not mental weakness.
Here we have a chilling reminder of just where blaming the victim can lead.
One of the degenerate-family studies Painter mentions, The Kallikak Family, was written by the head of the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in New Jersey, Henry H. Goddard. He related the story of one of the inmates there. Tracing her geneology, he found two branches of one family. One branch was filled with "doctors, lawyers, judges , educators, traders, landholders, in short, respectable citizens." The other branch sheltered an array of "degenerate" types, criminals, prostitutes, epileptics, illegitmate children, keepers of brothels and "82 dead babies."
The two branches arose from the same male progenitor but from different women.
The good Kallikaks came from the common ancestor's married union. The bad Kallikaks came from unmarried sex with a woman who worked in a tavern.
Painter writes about this history in the context of race, ethnicity and class. However, it's hard to ignore the spector of uncontrolled female reproduction that casts a shadow over it. In Hungry Coyote's diary, she embedded a clip in which a reporter asks an anti-choice advocate why he believes women seek abortions. The surprising thing is that he cannot answer the question at first. Finally, he takes a stab at the possibility that financial reasons may be the answer. I doubt that either that representative or Todd Akin have a coherent theory about all of this. Yet it seems clear that notions about class, race, social degeneracy, promiscuity, rape, female sexuality, intelligence and reproduction are all mixing together to form a toxic brew, one that is still informing social theories.