| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Wendy Kline. Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2001. Pp. xv, 218. $35.00.

Wendy Kline offers a considerable reinterpretation of eugenics in the United States, arguing that the movement did not decline in the 1930s and 1940s. Instead, she insists, it achieved its greatest "triumph" (p.147) during the 1950s. Kline reads the baby boom's dramatic increase in fertility as clear evidence that the white middle-class embraced the "reproductive morality" (p. 2) espoused by positive eugenics (the encouragement of larger families among those "best-suited" to parent). She concludes that the 1950s thus represented the "golden age of Eugenics" (p. 156). Previous scholars missed the significance of eugenics to the pronatalist culture of the 1950s, she asserts, because they have largely ignored the influence eugenicists had on twentieth-century gender and family roles. In a "country-wide crusade" (p. 1), eugenicists "sought to modernize morality" (p. 2). But expanding beyond the conventional definition of eugenics (racial improvement through selective breeding), Kline argues, eugenic reproductive morality placed motherhood at the center of women's lives and encouraged them to consider the impact of their procreative practices on American society. . . .

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