Eugenics

by

Molly Ladd-Taylor

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0011

Introduction

Eugenics, a term coined in 1883 by British statistician Francis Galton from the Greek for well-born, is an applied science of human heredity that aims to achieve “better” breeding and improve the human race. Although eugenics is often portrayed as a pseudoscience linked to extreme and racist policies such as forced sterilization and Nazi genocide, a rich historical literature portrays it as a science and social program with broad appeal and variable meanings. Eugenics was an expression of modernity, a biologizing vision for human improvement that was embraced by various political ideologies, from fascism to communism, liberalism to anarchism, and antifeminism to feminism, and arose alongside the nation-state. “Positive eugenics” encouraged the “better” part of the population to reproduce through measures like child health clinics and marriage counselling. “Negative eugenics” discouraged the reproduction of those considered inferior through institutional segregation, sterilization, and, at the most extreme, euthanasia. Medical professionals played a leading role in shaping and implementing both types of eugenics policies. Eugenic ideas about improving human heredity arose at roughly the same time in many parts of the world. Eugenicists exchanged ideas in scientific and medical journals and participated in international eugenics congresses held in London in 1912 and in New York City in 1921 and 1932. Yet eugenicists’ policy agendas and theoretical orientations differed, depending on local cultures and concerns. In the United States and Germany, most eugenicists embraced Mendel’s laws of genetic inheritance, minimized the role of the environment, and supported negative eugenic policies like sterilization. In contrast, “Latin” eugenicists tended to be neo-Lamarckian, emphasized the interaction of heredity and environment, and focused on population-level health and hygiene measures. They were less likely to embrace sterilization. Yet as the following works show, the exceptions were many. Recent research has extended the scope and periodization of the eugenics movement. Early histories supposed that the “old” eugenics declined in the 1930s and 1940s, with advances in genetic science and knowledge of Nazi atrocities, but that new reproductive technologies and genomic medicine created a “new” eugenics that is consumerist and voluntary rather than statist and coerced (although the line between voluntary and coerced is blurred). Others emphasize continuity, especially in the areas of medical genetics and population control. There is general agreement that the legacy of eugenics continues today. Scholars of gender, sexuality, disability, and colonialism have enriched older interpretations of eugenics that focused solely on race, ethnicity, and class. This bibliography contains a fraction of the international English-language scholarship on eugenics, with an emphasis on histories of health and medicine.

General Overviews

Scholarship on the history of eugenics has grown exponentially since the 1990s and is remarkable in its richness and variety. Important early histories of eugenics like Kevles 1995, Paul 1995, Stepan 1991, and Adams 1990, cited under Anthologies, were rooted in the history of science. More recently, scholarship on eugenics has tended to focus on culture. Dikötter 1998, Turda 2010, Bashford and Levine 2010, and Levine 2017 address the wide variety of eugenics policies and portray eugenics as a manifestation of modernity embraced by scientists and reformers with a range of social and political views. Turda 2010 also analyzes eugenics in Foucauldian terms of the biopolitical state. These overviews largely focus on the 1880s to the 1940s, the years of the movement’s greatest influence, although they acknowledge the persistence (or revival) of eugenics after 1945, particularly in medical genetics, reproductive technologies, and racial research. They also emphasize the lessons that eugenics holds for scientists and policymakers today. These overviews, like the eugenics movement itself, are transnational, while also being attentive to national and regional variations. Kevles 1995 compares the British and American eugenics movements. Paul 1995 adds Germany and Scandinavia to the comparison. Kühl 1994 explores the connections between American eugenics and Nazi race hygiene. Turda 2010 focuses on Europe, including central and southeastern Europe. Stepan 1991 studies eugenics in three Latin American countries, where ideologies of race and gender were markedly different from Germany, England, and the United States. Bashford and Levine 2010 is the first attempt at a truly global history of eugenics; it emphasizes colonial and national developments as well as eugenic intersections with race and gender.

• Bashford, Alison, and Philippa Levine. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

  DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195373141.001.0001

  This rich volume offers the most sophisticated overview of the global history of eugenics to date. A valuable introduction by the editors is followed by thirty-one chapters by leading scholars in the field. Part 1 is thematic, with transnational chapters on topics like the Darwinian context, anthropology, racial science, genetics, psychiatry, gender and sexuality, and genocide. Part 2, “National/Colonial Formations,” features case studies of eugenics in different parts of Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.

• Dikötter, Frank. “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics.” American Historical Review 103.2 (1998): 467–478.

  DOI: 10.1086/ahr/103.2.467

  This influential review essay by a historian of modern China discusses then-recent books on eugenics in Europe, North America, Latin America, and China. Dikötter emphasizes the multifaceted nature of eugenic thought, its wide appeal, and its role as a modernizing discourse. In a much-quoted statement, Dikötter writes, “Eugenics was not so much a clear set of scientific principles as a ‘modern’ way of talking about social problems in biologizing terms” (p. 467).

• Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

  Originally published in 1985, this engagingly written social and intellectual history remains one of the most important studies of eugenics as science and social program. Tracing developments in human genetics in England and the United States from the 1880s to the 1980s, Kevles highlights the differences between the British and American eugenics movements and analyzes the shifts from conservative “mainline eugenics” to “reform eugenics” in the 1930s to the market-driven “new eugenics” of today.

• Kühl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

  DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195082609.001.0001

  This brief and influential volume is the first detailed description of the close alliance between American and German eugenicists and their connection to Nazi race hygiene. Kühl points out that National Socialists modeled their sterilization program on US sterilization laws and shows how American eugenicists’ admiration for Nazi policies legitimized the Third Reich’s racial state.

• Levine, Philippa. Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

  DOI: 10.1093/actrade/9780199385904.001.0001

  This book, part of Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions series, provides a brief but thorough overview of the international eugenics movement and its role in shaping government policies. Levine argues that faith in science gave eugenics global appeal and analyzes the “varieties of eugenics” (p. 6) in relation to nationalism, Nazism, intelligence testing, moral danger, reproduction, race, immigration, religion, and resistance. The last chapter examines eugenics after 1945.

• Paul, Diane B. Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995.

  This clear, concise, and nuanced introduction to the history of eugenics was written with students in mind. Paul begins with a useful discussion of what eugenics is and why it matters. She then examines the origins of eugenics in 19th-century Britain and its development in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia. She concludes with the science of human genetics. Paul’s lucid discussion of theories of evolution and heredity is one of the book’s greatest strengths.

• Stepan, Nancy Leys. The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.

  Stepan’s influential volume examines eugenics in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico from the 1910s to the 1940s, contrasting the “normality” of Latin American eugenics with the extremist and racist forms it took in the United States and Germany. Latin American eugenicists adopted neo-Lamarckian theories of heredity, focused on health, hygiene, and the removal of environmental “racial poisons,” and at times even supported “constructive miscegenation.” Stepan’s analysis of Latin America’s “ordinary” eugenics underscores the importance of studying eugenics in its non-Nazi forms.

• Turda, Marius. Modernism and Eugenics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

  DOI: 10.1057/9780230281332

  This short book, one in a series on “Modernism and…,” is a complex comparative history of European eugenics between 1870 and 1940. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Turda explores the biologization of national belonging and brings central and southeastern Europe into the history of eugenics. Topics include the allure of scientism, the menace of degeneration, the impact of World War I, eugenic technologies of national improvement, the control of ethnic minorities, and the rise of the biopolitical state.