"Mothers of the Race:" Gender, Sterilization, and Historical Memory in North Carolina

In 2015, North Carolina became the first state to award monetary compensation to surviving victims of its eugenic sterilization program.  The program was responsible for sterilizing around 7,600 people—85 percent of them women—between 1929 and 1974. This paper analyzes the rhetoric about women as the targets of eugenic sterilization over the long sweep of the program’s history in order to consider patterns in the public’s conception of who deserves social welfare benefits and whose bodies are subject to the most intense scrutiny by the state.  I first examine Progressive reformers’ particular focus on white women as “mothers of the race” during the 1910s and 1920s, the two decades before sterilization began in earnest.  I briefly recount the shifts in this ideology during the 1950s and 1960s, as black women became the majority of sterilization victims.  Finally, I assess the past decade of media coverage of debates over compensating surviving victims, which have drawn national attention.  Although some news articles mention the fact that most of the surviving victims are poor, black women, little media coverage of the sterilization program’s history has tackled the gender dynamics in more than a cursory fashion.  I suggest some reasons for this surprising omission, pointing to the political alliance between civil rights activists and anti-abortion conservatives that enabled the passage of compensation legislation.