by Jill Lepore
69. Gordon Drake, Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? (Tulsa: Christian Crusade, 1968).
70. This battle is best related in Irvine, Talk About Sex. She argues that “opposition to sex education was a bridge issue between the Old Right and the New Right” (9).
71. Elders is quoted in Irvine, Talk About Sex, 1. See also Paul Richter and Marlene Cimons, “Clinton Fires Surgeon General After New Flap,” Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1994.
72. Robie H. Harris, It’s NOT the Stork! A Book About Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families, and Friends (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2009), 28.
73. Jennifer Ashton, The Body Scoop for Girls: A Straight-Talk Guide to a Healthy, Beautiful You (New York: Avery, 2009), 4, 21.
74. Lynda Madaras, Ready, Set, Grow! (New York: Newmarket, 2003), 14.
75. Louise Spilsbury, Me, Myself and I: All About Sex and Puberty (New York: Hodder Wayland Children’s, 2009), 4.
76. Valorie Lee Schaefer, The Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls (Middletown, WI: Pleasant Company, 1998), 42.
77. Gravelle, What’s Going on Down There?, 17; Ashton, Body Scoop for Girls, chapter 9; Schaefer, Care & Keeping of You, 17; Jacqui Bailey, Hair, There, and Everywhere: A Book About Growing Up (New York: Barron’s, 2008), 20.
78. Pepper Schwartz and Dominic Cappello, Ten Talks Parents Must Have with Their Children About Sex and Character (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 31. G. Stanley Hall also said, in “How and When to Be Frank with Boys,” that what boys need to know can be explained to them in “a ten-minute talk.”
Chapter 5. MR. MARRIAGE
1. Paul Popenoe and Dorothy Cameron Disney, Can This Marriage Be Saved? (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 6–20. Dick and Andrea Weymer, like all the names in Popenoe’s published cases, were not the couple’s real names.
2. Paul Popenoe’s picture appeared with this column for a quarter century. He didn’t write it, but all the cases came from his marriage clinic. See David Popenoe, War over the Family (2005; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), xii. The magazine called it “the most popular, most enduring women’s magazine feature in the world” (228).
3. Popenoe and Disney, Can This Marriage Be Saved?, vii. Popenoe’s career is discussed in Rebecca L. Davis, More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 33–37, 72–75, 96, 100, 121–24; Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe,” Gender and History 13 (2001): 298–327; and Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). A biographical sketch is available at the Paul Bowman Popenoe Papers, 1874–1991, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. For Popenoe’s prominence in the eugenics movement, see, for instance, Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 9, where Popenoe is listed as one of the movement’s six leaders.
4. Kline, Building a Better Race, 143–44.
5. Quoted in Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage,” 300, 310.
6. Paul Popenoe, A Family Consultation Service (New York: Institute of Family Relations, n.d.), 10–11. Paul Popenoe, “The Institute of Family Relations,” Eugenics 3 (1930): 134–37. Paul Popenoe, “Divorce and Remarriage from a Eugenic Point of View,” Social Forces 12 (1933): 48–50; quote from 48.
7. Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 42–43.
8. “England gave Darwin to the world,” Richard Hofstadter once wrote, “but the United States gave to Darwinism an unusually quick and sympathetic reception.” Spencer enjoyed an unusual American popularity as well. By the end of the nineteenth century, Spencer’s books had sold more than 350,000 copies. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944; Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), xiv, 34, 5.
9. Marshall Hyatt, Franz Boas, Social Activist: The Dynamics of Ethnicity (New York: Greenwood, 1990), 84–85. Wrote Carl Degler, “Whether called social Darwinism, or social Spencerism, the defense of the social and economic hierarchy of nineteenth-century America that the doctrine was intended to accomplish held little appeal for the men and women who were shaping the emerging fields of sociology, psychology, economics and anthropology at the end of the century.” Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 13.
10. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010), 41–45.
11. “One has not the right to doubt what the past has transmitted to us” was the assertion, made by a friend of Boas’s, that inspired him to a life of research and writing. Abram Kardiner and Edward Preble, They Studied Man (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1961), 135, 139. “The Negro Brain,” American Medicine 13 (April 1907): 197. On Boas, see especially Degler, In Search of Human Nature, chapter 3.
12. When Aleš Hrdlička, the curator of what would become the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, solicited “colored” embryos from Mall, Mall was not cooperative. Lynn Marie Morgan, Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 171–72, and Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 269. On Boas’s response to Bean’s “Negro Brain,” see Hyatt, Franz Boas, 91–92. Bean’s data and Mall’s response are also discussed in Stephen Jay Gould, Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (1981; repr., New York: Norton, 1996), 109–14.
13. Boas, quoted in Hyatt, Franz Boas, 88; DuBois quoted on 99. See also Boas, “What the Negro Has Done in Africa,” Ethical Record 5 (1904): 106–9; “The Problem of the American Negro,” Yale Review 10 (1921): 392–95; and Hyatt, Franz Boas, chapter 5.
14. Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 66. Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (1963; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 137. On Progressive-era fears of race suicide, see also Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), chapters 2 and 3, and Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), chapters 5 and 6. For a political history of eugenics from late-nineteenth-century populism through mid-twentieth-century pro-natalism, see Laura L. Lovett, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
15. C. C. Little, “Coat Color in Pointer Dogs,” Journal of Heredity 5 (1914): 244–48.
16. Gordon, Moral Property, 197; David M. Kennedy, The Birth Control Movement in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 118–19.
17. For a richly detailed history and analysis of the film, see Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
18. H. M. Freck, “The Wrong Address,” 1905. Postcard in the possession of the author.
19. Pernick, Black Stork, 56–57. And on the history of ideas about miscegenation, and its regulation, see Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
20. Paul Popenoe and E. S. Gosney, Twenty-eight Years of Sterilization in California (Pasadena, CA, 1938), preface. California, with 20,108 sterilizations, ranked first overall but third per capita. See Largent, Breeding Contempt, 77–78. See also Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), esp
ecially 79–81.
21. Paul Popenoe, “Eugenic Sterilization in California,” quoted in Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009), 235.
22. “While offering little positive data on the subject, the study has strengthened my impression of the relatively greater importance of endowment over training, as a determinant of an individual’s intellectual rank among his fellows.” Lewis M. Terman, “Genius and Stupidity: A Study of the Intellectual Processes of Seven ‘Bright’ and Seven ‘Stupid’ Boys,” PhD diss., Clark University, 1906, 10, 68.
23. Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, rev. ed. (1999; repr., New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 17–18. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 178–84, 206.
24. Examining test results of “Indians, Mexicans, and negroes,” he concluded that “their dullness seems to be racial.” Lewis M. Terman, The Measurement of Intelligence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 6–7, 11, 91–92.
25. Ibid., 18.
26. Lippmann’s statement in the New Republic is reproduced in Ned Joel Block and Gerald Dworkin, eds., “The Lippman-Terman Debate,” The IQ Controversy: Critical Readings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 4–44, especially 29, 8, 42, and 19. See also Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 168–69.
27. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; Or, The Racial Basis of European History, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), vii–viii, xi–xii, 10.
28. Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson, Applied Genetics (New York: Macmillan, 1920), v, 297, 285, 384–85, 374–75, 368–69.
29. E. S. Gosney and Paul Popenoe, Sterilization for Human Betterment (New York: Macmillan, 1929), v.
30. Grant, Passing of the Great Race, 91, 85. Popenoe and Johnson, Applied Genetics, chapter 12, “Increasing the Marriage Rate of the Superior.” See also Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 95–98.
31. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 51–55.
32. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; repr., New York: Scribner, 2004), 12–13.
33. Paul Popenoe, Modern Marriage: A Handbook (1925; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1927), vi.
34. Paul Popenoe, The Conservation of the Family (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1926), 6, 130, 144.
35. Ibid., 250, 6. Paul Popenoe to Madison Grant, April 14, 1928, as quoted in Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 189–90.
36. Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), is the fullest treatment. See also Stephen Jay Gould, “Carrie Buck’s Daughter,” in The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1985), 306–18, and Largent, Breeding Contempt, 100–102.
37. Gosney and Popenoe, Sterilization for Human Betterment, ix. The book both aspired to and reached a popular audience. See Kline, Building a Better Race, 78–80; and see the whole of her chapter 3 for Gosney and Popenoe’s research methods, in preparing this study for publication. On the German edition, see Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 43. More details of Gosney’s correspondence with German scientists and of their reaction to Sterilization for Human Betterment can be found in Kline, Building a Better Race, 103.
38. Davis, More Perfect Unions, 35, 123.
39. “Electronic Cupid,” Time, November 19, 1956.
40. Lewis Terman, Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938), vii, 6, 379, 407.
41. Popenoe, A Family Consultation Service, 5.
42. Popenoe, Modern Marriage, 159.
43. Kline, Building a Better Race, 146.
44. William McDougall, Is America Safe for Democracy? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921). These were McDougall’s Lowell lectures.
45. Terman, Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness, vii, 6, 379, 407.
46. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 161–67. Hofstadter discusses Popenoe and Johnson’s textbook on 165. He calls eugenics “the most enduring aspect of social Darwinism” (161); he discusses its atavism and its search for biological solutions to political problems. What he calls “the eugenics craze” was appealing because, while deeply conservative, it “had about it the air of a ‘reform’ ” (167). Pickens, in Eugenics and the Progressives, writes about the American eugenic tradition as distinctly averse to democracy.
47. On the control of family life as a central project of the movement, see, e.g., Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives, 73.
48. “Harvard Declines a Legacy to Found Eugenics Course,” New York Times, May 8, 1927.
49. Clarence Darrow, “The Eugenics Cult,” American Mercury 8 (June 1926): 129–37.
50. William L. Laurence, “Sees a Super-Race Evolved by Science,” New York Times, Au-gust 25, 1932.
51. Paul Popenoe, “The Progress of Eugenic Sterilization,” Journal of Heredity 25 (1934): 19–26. On the book burning, see Guido Enderis, “Nazi Fires to Get 160 Writers’ Books,” New York Times, May 6, 1933, and Emily Graff, “ ‘Books Like These Are Burned!’: The 1933 Nazi Book Burnings in American Historical Memory” (BA thesis, Harvard University, 2009). On Popenoe and Bell, see Popenoe to Bell, May 23, 1933, as quoted in Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles, 190. Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 343. Madison Grant, The Conquest of a Continent: The Expansion of Races in America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), vii, 347–51.
52. Grant thanks “his research associate Doctor Paul Popenoe” in his acknowledgments (Conquest of a Continent, xi).
53. Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 345. Meanwhile, academic geneticists vigorously repudiated eugenics. Dunn’s interesting letters are discussed in Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society, 127–29; and see, more broadly, chapter 6.
54. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 202–3.
55. Paul Popenoe, “The German Sterilization Law,” Journal of Heredity 25 (July 1934): 257–60. See also Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage,” 307. As late as 1938, Popenoe was celebrating sterilization—that is, in Twenty-eight Years of Sterilization, 22. On the German sterilization law as based on the California statute, see Kline, Building a Better Race, 103.
56. Abraham Myerson, “Research Urged” [letter to the editor], New York Times, March 15, 1936; see also Abraham Myerson, Speaking of Man (New York: Knopf, 1950). Dunn is quoted in Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society, 130. Popenoe had defended eugenics to Dunn in 1934 (Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 202–3).
57. E. B. White, “The World of Tomorrow,” One Man’s Meat (Gardiner, ME: Tilbury House, 1997), 58–64; quote from 58. First published in the New Yorker on May 13, 1939, as “They Came with Joyous Song.”
58. Haller, Eugenics, 179. Gordon, Moral Property, 202.
59. Paul Popenoe to Mariann Olden, May 5, 1945, as quoted in Kline, Building a Better Race, 104.
60. Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage,” 314. In 1962, Popenoe wrote, “The major factor in the decline of eugenics was undoubtedly Hitlerism” (cited in Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives, 99).
61. Darrow, “The Eugenics Cult,” 132, 137. See also Michael Willrich, “The Two Percent Solution: Eugenic Jurisprudence and the Socialization of American Law, 1900–1930,” Law and History Review 16 (1998): 104.
62. On the Celestial Bed, see Lydia Syson, Doctor of Love: James Graham and His Celestial Bed (Richmond, Surrey, UK: Alma Books, 2008).
63. Davis, More Perfect Unions, 3.
64. Laurie Abraham, The Husbands and Wives Club: A Year in the Life of a Couples Therapy Group (New York: Touchstone, 2010), 62.
65. Davis, More Perfect Unions, 258, 3.
66. Elizabeth Weil, “Married (Happily) with Issues,” New York Times Magazine, December 1, 2009.
67. Abraham,
Husbands and Wives Club, 2–3, 280, 96, 19, 245, 284, 274.
68. “Electronic Cupid,” Time, November 19, 1956.
69. Lori Gottlieb, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough (New York: Dutton, 2010), chapter 4, 101, 106.
70. Tara Parker-Pope, For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage (New York: Dutton, 2010), 1–3, chapter 9. Earlier, “Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers” was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize, a prize given to the junkiest piece of scientific research. “The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners,” Improbable Research, http://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2008.
71. Brian Leubitz, “0 for 2: Blankenhorn Looks Lost,” Prop 8 Trial Tracker (blog), January 26, 2010, http://www.prop8trialtracker.com/2010/01/26/0-for-2-the-defendants-are-playing-for-some-other-audience/. See also Gary Shih, “Same-Sex Marriage Case, Day 11: Churches,” The Bay Area (blog), New York Times, January 26, 2010, http://bayarea.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/same-sex-marriage-case-day-11-churches/. David Popenoe, War over the Family, 84. On the history of marriage and the state, see Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
72. David Popenoe on “social suicide”: David Popenoe, Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society (New York: Free Press, 1996), 192. Popenoe and Johnson on “race suicide”: Popenoe and Johnson, Applied Genetics, chapter 12.
73. On their joint publication, see David Popenoe, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and David Blankenhorn, eds., Promises to Keep: Decline and Renewal of Marriage in America (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 1996). Institute for American Values and the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, The State of Our Unions: Marriage in America, 2010; When Marriage Disappears—the New Middle America, http://www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/pdfs/
Union_11_12_10.pdf.
74. David Popenoe, “Remembering My Father: An Intellectual Portrait of ‘The Man Who Saved Marriages,’ ” in War over the Family.