Under the Guise of Protection

Eugenics and Wayward Girls in Twentieth-Century Virginia

A shocking story of social engineering in the era of Jim Crow

The eugenics movement, in which the state arrogated to itself the right to determine who could and who could not have children, was a dark, shameful chapter in American history. Virginia was infamous as an epicenter of eugenic thought; the case of Buck v. Bell, which resulted in one of the Supreme Court's most notorious decisions, originated there. In Under the Guise of Protection, Erin Bush describes how state programs designed for "delinquent" young women like Carrie Buck—whose sterilization took place while she was an inmate at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded—developed in Virginia's distinctive environment of "progressive" ideology and racial segregation.

Buck was far from alone. Between 1910 and 1942, the commonwealth's public welfare bureaucrats and charity workers confined more than 2,300 adolescent white and African American girls at juvenile reformatories. By examining the programs developed at these segregated institutions, in both rural and urban areas, this groundbreaking book sheds new light on the connections between juvenile justice, racial politics, and the tendentious use of "science" in the development of social reforms in the early twentieth century.

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