| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States. By Mark A. Largent. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008. xii, 213 pp. Cloth, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8135-4182-2.)

Mark A. Largent argues that involuntary sterilization in the United States has a long and widespread history. Beginning in the mid- nineteenth century and continuing to the present, authorities have used sterilization to control the behavior and limit the reproductive capacity of thousands of Americans. The first sterilizers, institutional superintendents, found in male castrations and female hysterectomies ways to stop lewd behavior—especially masturbation—in their incarcerated inmates. During the first decades of the twentieth century, new proponents of sterilization shifted their rationale to eugenics and their preferred procedures to vasectomies and tubal ligations. Largent shows that there were disagreements among physicians, biologists, and legal authorities about the efficacy, morality, and legality of the procedures. No profession particularly dominated the advocacy for, or the criticism of, coerced sterilization.

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