1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910787492303321

Autore

McLaren Angus

Titolo

Our own master race : eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 / / Angus McLaren

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Toronto, Ontario ; ; Buffalo, New York ; ; London, England : , : University of Toronto Press, , 2014

©1990

ISBN

1-4426-5587-9

1-4426-2331-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (232 p.)

Collana

Canadian Social History Series

Disciplina

363.9/2/0971

Soggetti

Eugenics - Canada - History - 20th century

History

Electronic books.

Canada

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

The birth of biological politics -- Public health and hereditarian concerns -- Stemming the flood of defective aliens -- Sex, science, and race betterment -- Creating a haven for human thoroughbreds -- The eugenics society of Canada -- Genetics, eugenics, and human pedigress -- The death of eugenics?

Sommario/riassunto

Was Canada immune to the racist currents of thought that swept central Europe in the 1920's and 1930's? In this landmark book Angus McLaren, co-author of The Bedroom and the State, examines the pervasiveness in Canada of the eugenic notion of "race betterment" and demonstrates that many Canadians believed that radical measures were justified to protect the community from the "degenerate." The sterilization of the feeble-minded in Alberta and British Columbia was merely the most dramatic attempt to limit the numbers of the "unfit." But in the decades prior to World War Two, eugenic preoccupations were to colour discussions of immigration restriction, birth control, mental testing, family allowances, and a host of similar social policies. Doctors, psychiatrists, geneticists, social workers, and mental



hygienists provided an anxious Canadian middle class with the reassuring argument that poverty, crime, prostitution, and mental retardation were primarily the products of defective genes, not a defective social system. In explaining why biological solutions were sought for social problems McLaren not only provides a provocative reappraisal of the ideas and activities of a generation of feminists, political progressives, and public health propagandists but he also explores some of the roots of our not-so-latent racist tendencies.