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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. xv + 218 pp. Ill. $35.00, £24.95 (0-520-22502-3).
Wendy Kline has added an important perspective to the growing literature on eugenics, especially in the United States. Building a Better Race addresses the issues of race and gender in the eugenics movement of the period 1910-50, and that movement's influence on the postwar generations up through the turn of the millennium. Kline portrays the development of genetics in terms of the new sexuality and morality of the early decades of the twentieth century, and ties these changes into the larger perspective of the perceived "degeneration" of society. Eugenics, as she sees it, gained its popularity by addressing both the problem of race (in its broad sense, as "human race") and the change in women's position within society, especially with regard to their role as reproductive agents and mothers. The solution to the prospect of improper motherhood was sterilization, so Kline concentrates her study on California, where the largest percentages of eugenical sterilizations in the United States took place (over half by 1935). She raises a number of interesting questions, and provides new information about institutions such as the Sonoma State Hospital and Paul Popenoe and Roswell Johnson's Human...