Family eugenics in the United States: Paul Popenoe and the American Institute of Family Relations
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52292/csh5320244895Keywords:
eugenics, United States, Paul PopenoeAbstract
Paul Popenoe was a renowned American eugenicist. As founder of the American Institute of Family Relations (1930), Popenoe dedicated much of his career to disseminating a heteronormative family model, with the intention of influencing social welfare. Although since the 1910s he dedicated himself to spreading practices such as forced sterilization, it was mainly after 1945 that his pedagogical proposal became hegemonic among eugenicists in the United States. This year is usually defined as a turning point for eugenics because the defeat of Nazism exposed the genocidal consequences of the paradigm. Although historiography usually considers that negative eugenics was predominant in the Anglo-Saxon sphere and that positive eugenics prevailed among Latin eugenicists, this differentiation does not correspond to mutually incompatible strategies. This article aims to investigate the hybridization of Popenoe's speeches throughout his academic and media career, which lasted until his death in 1979. Popenoe defended intervention on bodies and eugenic education. It is interesting to understand both models as complementary mechanisms. Popenoe is an example that makes it difficult to generalize his career into the category of negative or positive eugenicist, especially with the emergence of late-eugenics at the end of World War II. This new model sought to separate itself from negative practices but without abandoning the basic ideas that assumed the existence of superior genes or characters, which should prevail over the inferior ones.
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