| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. By Wendy Kline. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xvi, 218 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-520-22502-3.)

To the raft of eugenics scholarship that has appeared since 1985, Wendy Kline adds this concise and provocative examination of the gender imperatives inherent in the American eugenics movement. Kline demonstrates how eugenicists refurbished Victorian morality, transforming it into a self-consciously modern notion of "reproductive morality." Kline's work is notable for more than her rigorous gender analysis, however. She chronicles California's infatuation with eugenics, linking West Coast eugenicists to their better-studied eastern and international colleagues. Kline also establishes the continuity between early, racist eugenic ideas and the pronatalist rhetoric that survives today--further debunking the myth that American eugenics died after the revelations of the Nazi Holocaust. Thus, she restores eugenic ideology to a more central position in American intellectual and cultural history. . . .

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