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Our Own Master Race Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 1st Edition

SKU: 9781442623316

Original price was: $43.95.Current price is: $13.19.

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Additional information

Full Title

Our Own Master Race Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 1st Edition

Author(s)

Angus McLaren

Edition

1st Edition

ISBN

9781442623316, 9781442659643

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Format

PDF and EPUB

Description

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.

Availability: In Stock

Our Own Master Race Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 1st Edition

SKU: 9781442655874

Original price was: $40.95.Current price is: $12.29.

Access Our Own Master Race Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 1st Edition Now. Discount up to 90%

Categories: ,

Additional information

Full Title

Our Own Master Race Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 1st Edition

Author(s)

Angus McLaren

Edition

1st Edition

ISBN

9781442655874, 9781442659643

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Format

PDF and EPUB

Description

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.