Throughout the early 20th century, eugenics discourse came to colour many facets of social policy making across Canada. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the ways by which eugenics and the mental hygiene movement impacted the practice of child protection during the early 20th century. I argue that the construction and propagation of the term and classification of ‘feeble-mindedness’ was used by child protection workers to exclude an increasing number of children from both care and society. During this period, social workers were complicit in the sorting, classifying and segregating of children deemed ‘feeble-minded’ with the expressed purpose of eradicating certain classes of people from society and moreover the gene pool. Women shouldered the burden of the social reform movement, as they were considered both the solution to, and the cause, of social ills. Controlling women’s reproduction was seen as the best way to ensure ‘race betterment’. Women at the intersection of race, class and ability were often constructed as ‘feeble-minded’ and segregated for fear that they would reproduce ‘their kind’. Initially, the child protection system blatantly excluded those deemed ‘unworthy’ or ‘unreformable’. Under the rubric of eugenics, however, child protection’s role shifted and the system became complicit in the application of eugenic principle to child and family life and women’s reproduction under the auspice of ‘race betterment’ and nation building. Through this exploratory study, it is evident that the normative structures of child protection policy remain unchanged. Extricating children from troubled environments at the least possible cost continues to trump a more insightful look at how policy and resources should engage with structural concerns, such as poverty. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

This project examines two organizations--the Better Babies Bureau and the Children's Bureau--created by Progessive women in the early twentieth century to combat high infant mortality rates, improve prenatal and postnatal care, and better child welfare. The Better Babies Bureau, founded in 1913 by journalists from the Woman's Home Companion magazine, and the Children's Bureau, founded as a federal agency in 1912, used similar campaigns to raise awareness of these child welfare problems in the early 1900s; where they differed, however, is in their ultimate goals. The Children's Bureau sought to improve long-term medical care and infant mortality rates for women regardless of race or socioeconomic status; I analyze how they worked directly with midwives and health officials to provide better care for mothers and children. The Better Babies Bureau, in comparison, catered specifically to white women through prize-based contests and eugenics rhetoric. Through their better baby contests, they promoted the idea that disabilities and defects should be eliminated in children in order to create a better future. By the late 1910s, these two organizations were utilizing nationwide campaigns to appeal to mothers through either consumerism or health conferences. I argue that although the Better Babies Bureau made a greater cultural impact, the Children's Bureau made a longer lasting—and farther reaching—impact on infant mortality rates by making healthcare more accessible for both rural and urban women. / Master of Arts / In the early twentieth century, many Americans became concerned with the number of children dying before age one. This thesis examines two different organizations that were created in an attempt to reduce these infant mortality rates, improve prenatal and postnatal care, and better child welfare. These two organizations, the Children's Bureau and the Better Babies Bureau, were created and run by Progressive women who took vastly different approaches to raising awareness of these problems. The Children's Bureau worked directly with health and government officials to improve child welfare and healthcare. Meanwhile, the Better Babies Bureau utilized contests to convince mothers that defects and disabilities needed to be eliminated in their children. In this thesis, I argue that the Children's Bureau was ultimately far more effective by appealing to a wider audience, creating a plan for long-term medical care, and improving access to prenatal and postnatal care for women.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wyoming, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Apr. 12, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-130).

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Wien, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 311-332) and index.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Wien, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 311-332) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Sociology, 2009.. / Includes bibliographical references.

The thesis analyses the Finnish immigration apparatus through a Foucaultian governmentality framework and critiques the way immigration has been problematized. The immigration apparatus, ranging from discourses to various administrative regulations and their rationalities, is examined through the Finnish Aliens Act, Schengen visa regulations, and Finnish Immigration Services implementation documentation as well as through the related governmental bills and reports and parliamentary discussions and committee statements between 1999 and 2010. The thesis argues that the governmentality of immigration is a socio-evolutionary governmentality that relies on largely taken-for-granted conceptualisations of how society needs to be governed. The thesis shows that immigration control cannot be understood solely through the discourses of nationalism, liberalism and multiculturalism, but that these discourses themselves need to be understood in the light of a state racist socio-evolutionary constellation of power/knowledge at the heart of liberal governmentality and its naturalism. In the first instance, this claim is supported by a discourse theoretical analysis of the functioning of power/knowledge in immigration-related discourses. Additionally, the claim is supported by contrasting the analysis of discourses and rationalities of governing with an analysis of technologies of governing, i.e. rules and regulations of immigration control. The thesis then questions the governmentality of the immigration apparatus through various epistemological tools of decentring. These tools highlight how a commonsensical truth about immigration and its governing is produced through methods, such as utilising explanations relying on psychologism, historicism, naturalisation, market veridiction and universalism/particularism, which enable a silence and scarcity of meaning around the taken-for-granted modes of knowing immigration and its governing. Finally, this claim about state racist governmentality of immigration is evidenced by a comparison of the contemporary way of problematizing immigration with the way immigration was problematized by early American race hygienic immigration policies. This comparison insists that eugenics and social Darwinism should not be exceptionalised, but that their rationalities of governing should be evaluated in terms of the logic of making live and letting die that they propose. The thesis concludes that unacknowledged and taken-for-granted modes of knowing the world in socio-evolutionary terms and specifically in social Darwinist terms emphasizing social position as a measure of fitness and human worth and entailing an all-inclusive logic of racialisation have an impact on contemporary liberal ways of governing immigration both in general and in Finland in, at the point at which we think how immigration should be governed so that it promotes the health and wealth of the population and defends it from degeneration.

This study examines how propaganda imagery was used to reveal metaphors of health and disease in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Specifically, it explores how German medical and political authorities of this period entrenched biological explanations for social ills through medico-political discourses of disease, criminality and deviancy, in their efforts to exterminate particular populations. This propaganda was conversed with the idealised and beautified German Volk who, in turn, were graphically elevated to the realms of a supreme master race. I use a methodology composed of compositional and discourse analysis, and a theoretical framework that develops the work of Erving Goffman. These frameworks were applied to a range of images from a sample of propagandist movies, published within the time-frame, in order to illuminate how the German medical establishment sought to realise the juxtaposition of both promoting life and administering death. Findings suggest that the biological categorising and subjective measuring of individuals was a modernistic philosophy. Extensive use of metaphors resulted in a widening range of stigmas which needed medical intervention to maintain normality and social order whilst purifying and cleansing the body politic. The study advances the understanding of the relationship between the discourses of health and disease with an in-depth sociopolitical study of imagery, asking why it was used to legitimate and nationalise social inequality in the context of Nazi Germany. It further offers a new socio-filmic model for future use when analysing moving imagery in the sociohistorical field. These two advances therefore provide novel contributions to the sociology of public health and social methods.

Thesis advisor: James M. O'Toole / This dissertation argues that the movement to restrict European immigration to the United States in the early 1900s was critically supported by a set of ideas that the dissertation refers to as "classic racialism." Derived from several intellectual traditions - such as anthropology, biology, criminology, eugenics and zoology - classic racialism posited that differences in human population groups were biologically determined and hereditary, and because of this fact, American nativists held that the "new" immigration to the United States had to be curtailed in order to save the American Anglo-Saxon racial stock. The dissertation uses Italian immigration to the United States as a case study for understanding the fluidity of racial and biological thought. While classic racialism played a key role in supporting nativists' calls for immigration restriction, advances in methods of scientific research were revolutionizing the fields of biology, genetics and anthropology. Research in these fields cast doubts on the veracity of intellectual claims made by classic racialists, which were increasingly untenable in the light of advancing scientific knowledge. The tensions between these competing intellectual paradigms of classic racialism and modern experimentalism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries reveal the esoteric nature of scientific revolutions, in that the uncertainty and complexity of the developing biological and genetic sciences kept knowledge of scientific advances in these fields restricted to a narrow audience of professional scientists and academics. While modern experimental biology raised significant scientific doubts about the principles of classic racialism, it was the latter that influenced American immigration policy in the 1920s because of classic racialism's simplicity and the broad public recognition that "like produces like." / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

In the early twentieth century, the American eugenics movement began to dominate much of the public discourse surrounding disability, particularly the disability known as “feeble-mindedness.” Eugenicists broadly depicted the feeble-minded as both innocent children because of their supposed lack of intelligence and moral deviants who could harm members of society. There are many studies that have analyzed the effects of this construction of disability in popular culture and American films. However, only a few scholars, such as Joseph Straus and Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, have asked what the feeble mind sounds like. Through a musical analysis of the leitmotifs present in the film scores for Of Mice and Men (1939) and Oklahoma! (1955), this thesis argues that the symptomology of feeble-mindedness and social stereotypes of the disability seeped into and influenced the musical portrayals of Jud Fry and Lennie Small. Jud and Lennie reflected many of the anxieties surrounding disability during the eugenics era. Although the films’ narratives reveal the ideological positions towards disability, music also plays a significant role announcing characters’ disability and encouraging particular responses to disability. The musicians for these films, including Aaron Copland, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Robert Russell Bennett, accomplished this task by musically imitating a disabled embodiment. By mimicking either physical symptoms or social stereotypes of feeble-mindedness, particularly obsession and idiocy, the film scores represent Jud and Lennie as either innocent children or social menaces to support the ideological stance of each film.