Great Britain

• Socially Driven
  • working class singled out
  • undesirables were the unemployed
  • looked at the class system and benefits from each class to society
  • “The problem, the, was seen to be a selection of the working class that lacked both moral fibre (i.e. was outside social control) and physical fitness.” Pg 516
  • “This group of degenerates was outbreeding skilled workers and the professional middle class.” Pg 516
• People
  • Karl Pearson
    • mathematician-statisics
    • protege of Galton
    • headed The Galton Eugenics Laboratory
    • did not want his statistical research to be used for propaganda
    • fully supported the Eugenics Movement
  • Havelock Ellis
  • Ellen Parker Pinsent
    • An activist in the school program for mentally handicapped children.
    • She wrote multiple books on mental health policy and then became a member of the Royal Commission on Care and Control of the Feebleminded from 1904-1908.
    • In the 1910 election, she demanded that every candidate for Parliament address the topic of the feebleminded and discouraging parenthood.
    • Eugenics Education Society
• Legislation
  • Immigration
    • Alien’s Act of 1905
      • Government could prevent the following people from entering the country
        • Diseased
        • Criminals
        • Low-lifes
    • “British eugenicists talked of the loss of able Englanders to the colonies and of the influx of immigrants, they stressed the threat of national fiber arising from the differential birth rates” (3)
  • Mental deficiency
    • Ellen Parker Pinsent
    • Winston Churchill’s stance on the matter was that feebleminded people should be “segregated under proper conditions so that their curse died with them and was not transmitted to future generations” (p. 98).
    • Mental deficiency bill passed in 1913
      • Recognized that there are varieties of mental deficiency and they range from, cretinism or mongolism to the inability to benefit from education.
      • The law did not enforce segregation or sterilization.
      • The law did “grant a central authority compulsory powers to detain and segregate certain of the ‘feebleminded,’ a feature which would result in some curbs upon multiplication of the unfit” (p. 99).
      • The feebleminded included
        • habitual drunks
        • poor people
        • pregnant women on poor relief
        • people pregnant with an illegitimate child
        • unemployed
      • Genetics has become a huge role on the determinacy of such conditions.
  • No Sterilization Laws or marriage laws were ever passed in Britain, the only British Colony to pass a sterilization law was Alberta