1950s
Though the U.S. Library of Congress claims that the formal eugenics movement came to an end after World War II, supporters of involuntary sterilization continued to promote and expand sterilization campaigns with the help of institutions—such as elite universities—the dozens of state laws allowing involuntary sterilization, and the precedent set by Buck v. Bell in 1927.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Clarence Gamble funded and launched organizations across the country to promote sterilization and birth control in states like North Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, Arkansas, Texas and Nebraska. Gamble, a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School and the heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune, leveraged his wealth and connections to expand birth control and sterilization programs.
As early as the 1930s, Gamble began funding the distribution of birth control supplies through the North Carolina State Board of Health, which influenced other states to offer birth control as a public health measure. He also served in various executive positions at the Pennsylvania Birth Control Federation, the American Birth Control League, and Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. Together, Gamble and Sanger introduced a sterilization statute in Puerto Rico that led to the sterilization of approximately one-third of women on the island between the 1930s and 1970s.
This sterilization campaign in Puerto Rico, in addition to the medical experimentation Gamble imposed on Puerto Rican women, faced resistance from, for instance, the Young Lords, the revolutionary organization that fought for the self-determination of Puerto Ricans. La Operación documents these abuses in the 1950s and 1960s.
By 1949, Gamble was even influencing Japan’s National Institute of Public Health to incorporate birth control in all of their health centers with the help of Frank W. Notestein, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton and future president of the Population Council. In the 1950s, he founded the Human Betterment League of North Carolina as a testing ground for programs of forced sterilization. The organization targeted predominantly Black men and women who were deemed “unintelligent,” “promiscuous,” or a “public charge” in an attempt to justify that their reproduction was undesirable for the nation’s “gene pool.” This program continued until 1977, and the state government apologized in 2002 and offered financial compensation to victims in 2013. The state government also created an Office of Justice for Sterilization Victims. This is an example of one of their “educational” pamphlets.
Another organization Gamble funded was Birthright in New Jersey, which later changed its name to the Human Betterment Association of America. In the postwar era, professors at institutions like Cornell University, New York University, Vassar College, Ohio State University, Stanford University and Dartmouth College requested "educational" materials about sterilization from the organization. And the organization continued to lobby politicians like then Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy.
Following World War II, however, the genocide in Nazi Germany tarnished the eugenics movement’s image and organizations like the American Eugenics Society sought to rebrand themselves. Eugenicists focused their resources not only on preventing the reproduction of people with “undesirable” genes but also on encouraging upper-middle-class, white heterosexual couples with “desirable” genes to reproduce and preserve the “traditional American family.”
The marriage counseling industry saw a boom in the postwar era as suburbs sprawled. It became one of the avenues through which eugenicists like Paul Popenoe of the American Institute of Family Relations promoted their ideals. These ideals included that a family structure be patriarchal with a husband who worked and a wife who stayed at home, and this structure was considered crucial to the country’s success. Eugenicists also viewed male dominance and female submission as biologically natural as they shifted their “research” to define the “normal” and “biological” characteristics in the gender binary.