Our Own Master Race : : Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 / / Angus McLaren.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press eBook-Package Archive 1933-1999
• VerfasserIn: McLaren, Angus,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©1990
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Canadian Social History Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (230 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. The Birth of Biological Politics -- 2. Public Health and Hereditarian Concerns -- 3. Stemming the Flood of Defective Aliens -- 4. Sex, Science, and Race Betterment -- 5. Creating a Haven for Human Thoroughbreds -- 6. The Eugenics Society of Canada -- 7. Genetics, Eugenics, and Human Pedigrees -- 8. The Death of Eugenics? -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Index -- Backmatter