Download PDF by Angus McLaren: Our Own Master Race Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945

By Angus McLaren

Used to be Canada resistant to the racist currents of inspiration that swept valuable Europe within the 1920's and 1930's? during this landmark ebook Angus McLaren, co-author of The bed room and the kingdom, examines the pervasiveness in Canada of the eugenic concept of "race betterment" and demonstrates that many Canadians believed that radical measures have been justified to guard the neighborhood from the "degenerate." The sterilization of the feeble-minded in Alberta and British Columbia used to be basically the main dramatic try to restrict the numbers of the "unfit." yet within the a long time sooner than international conflict , eugenic preoccupations have been to color discussions of immigration restrict, contraception, psychological trying out, kin allowances, and a number of comparable social policies.

Doctors, psychiatrists, geneticists, social employees, and psychological hygienists supplied an nervous Canadian center category with the reassuring argument that poverty, crime, prostitution, and psychological retardation have been essentially the goods of faulty genes, no longer a faulty social approach. In explaining why organic strategies have been searched for social difficulties McLaren not just offers a provocative reappraisal of the tips and actions of a iteration of feminists, political progressives, and public overall healthiness propagandists yet he additionally explores the various roots of our not-so-latent racist tendencies.

Originally released by way of McClelland & Stewart, 1990.

Show description

Read or Download Our Own Master Race Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 PDF

Best nonfiction_13 books

Michael Moltenbrey's Dawn of Small Worlds: Dwarf Planets, Asteroids, Comets PDF

This e-book offers an in depth advent to the tens of millions of smaller our bodies within the sun approach. Written for laymen, novice astronomers and scholars it describes the character and beginning of asteroids, dwarf planets and comets, and provides targeted information regarding their function within the sunlight approach.

Download e-book for iPad: Quantization on Nilpotent Lie Groups by Veronique Fischer;Michael Ruzhansky

This ebook provides a constant improvement of the Kohn-Nirenberg sort worldwide quantization conception within the atmosphere of graded nilpotent Lie teams when it comes to their representations. It incorporates a distinctive exposition of similar historical past themes on homogeneous Lie teams, nilpotent Lie teams, and the research of Rockland operators on graded Lie teams including their linked Sobolev areas.

Download e-book for kindle: The Geopolitics of Europe’s Identity: Centers, Boundaries, by N. Parker

This publication pursues an unique standpoint on Europe's moving quantity and geopolitical status: how nations and areas marginal to it effect on Europe as a middle. A theoretical dialogue of borders and margins is constructed, and set opposed to 9 stories of nations, areas, and identities noticeable as marginal to Europe.

Read e-book online The Soldiers' national cemetery at Gettysburg PDF

. .. with the court cases at its consecration, on the laying of the corner-stone of the monument, and at its commitment

Extra info for Our Own Master Race Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945

Example text

Only the specialist could determine the importance of such issues. The hereditarians' assertion that foreigners were "inferior" was not STEMMING THE FLOOD OF DEFECTIVE ALIENS 51 original. 22 The country had the right to prevent itself from being swamped by carriers of hereditary feeble-mindedness. Helen MacMurchy, as the nation's expert on the subject, raised the alarm that the arrival of such degenerates threatened the fabric of Canadian society. In the same reports to the Ontario government that called for special education of the backward, she recommended as well that entry to the country of the feeble-minded be barred.

They accused lay officials of "ignorance or callous indifference" and parents of "ignorance" in the care and feeding of their children. But they promised that in return for acceptance of medical dictates great rewards could be reaped. Dr. Charles Hastings, the Toronto medical health officer, similarly asserted that medical intervention in home life was well warranted. "Psychologists assure us that mental, moral and physical degeneration go hand in hand. This is well attested by observations made in the children's courts in the various cities.

This explains why so many otherwise intelligent humanitarians supported the labelling, the segregation, and ultimately the sterilization of those they designated subnormal. 60 It was a "progressive" movement concerned by what it took to be the multiplication of unhealthy families. Its middle-class Anglo-Saxon members tended to interest themselves in medicine, social Darwinism, positivism, and elitist centralization that appeared to offer the respectable some promise of protection from the social threats of the day.

Download PDF sample

Our Own Master Race Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 by Angus McLaren


by Christopher
4.2

Rated 4.18 of 5 – based on 46 votes