The sterilisation-seekers

In the story of eugenics, disabled people are often depicted as passive victims. But for some it seemed an opportunity

by Coreen McGuire & Alex Aylward + BIO

Detail from a poster created by the British Eugenics Society, c1930s. Courtesy the Wellcome Collection

is assistant professor in the Department of History at Durham University, UK. She is the author of Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period (2020).

is a departmental lecturer in the history of science at the University of Oxford, UK. He is working on his first monograph, titled ‘Selective Reading: Evolution, Eugenics, and the Contested Legacies of R A Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection’.

Edited byNigel Warburton

A working man, father of six, sits at the table in his small bungalow on the outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent in the Midlands of England. He – let’s call him Mr H – takes a pencil and paper and traces the outline of each of his hands. He then folds the paper and places it, along with a descriptive note, in an envelope addressed to the Eugenics Society, 20 Grosvenor Gardens, London, and ‘anxiously await[s] reply’.

It is December 1930, and a campaign to legalise the surgical sterilisation of the ‘mentally deficient’ is in full swing. Over the previous decade, thousands of people have already been sterilised across various US states, under laws penned and promoted by eugenics campaigners. Inspired, Britain’s Eugenics Society – whose 700-strong membership included medical doctors, clergymen and leading scientists, such as the statistician R A Fisher and the biologist Julian Huxley – is on the march, pumping out propaganda pamphlets and filling correspondence sections of UK newspapers, magazines and medical journals. Eugenic sterilisation, they argue, is safe, humane, and urgently necessary. Only decisive action can curtail the supposed overzealous breeding of so-called ‘defectives’ and arrest the racial deterioration of the British people. Moreover, and crucially amid the economic wreckage of the Great Depression, a sterilisation programme promises to curb the spiralling costs of caring for those deemed ‘feebleminded’ in overburdened state institutions.

Historians know what happens next, or rather, what doesn’t. Unlike their counterparts in the United States, Canada or, notoriously, Germany, British politicians proved unwilling to ratify such extreme and targeted interventions into the lives and bodies of individual citizens. When introduced into Parliament in the summer of 1931, the Eugenics Society-backed Sterilisation Bill was defeated – 89 ‘ayes’ versus 167 ‘noes’ (130 of which came from Labour MPs who opposed the Bill as anti-working class). The matter was never again put to the vote in Westminster.

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A near miss. Fast-forward a decade and a half and, amid the fallout from the Second World War and revelations of Nazi genocide, ‘eugenics’ would acquire toxic political baggage. The Eugenics Society limped on through the postwar period but, as the credibility of the wider movement crumbled, its mission necessarily evolved. With successive rebrands – most recently in 2021 when it became the Adelphi Genetics Forum – the organisation steadily shed its divisive policy ambitions, reinventing itself as a learned society with the sole aim of supporting basic scientific research in human genetics.

Here lies an apparent irony in the history of modern eugenics. The very word ‘eugenics’, meaning attempts to shape human evolution through controlling who does and does not reproduce, is a British invention, coined in 1883 by Charles Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton. The idea took off in Edwardian England, made concrete through the establishment, in 1907, of what was initially called the Eugenics Education Society, and of the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics at University College London. An idea, a movement, a would-be ‘science’ born in Britain. And yet, practical application of eugenic principles was only ever realised elsewhere. Sterilisation of those considered imperfect – that most archetypal eugenic intervention – bypassed Britain entirely.

Amid the Eugenics Society’s propaganda storm, one piece – an article in The Daily Mail by Julian Huxley entitled ‘One In 100 A Burden To The Rest’ (1930) – caught Mr H’s eye. The article discussed ‘new methods of dealing with the immense and growing army of mental defectives’ and advocated for a combination of sterilisation and institutionalisation to reduce their numbers. Mr H took up the author’s invitation to write to the Eugenics Society for further printed material on sterilisation. In his letter, he expressed his desire to be sterilised, and pleaded for assistance. Doctors had assured him that the congenital deformity of his hands and feet would not be passed on to any children. So it proved for the first five girls, who were ‘perfectly formed’. The sixth baby girl, though, then 12 weeks old, he described as ‘deformed in almost the same manner as myself’. Mr H was willing to undergo ‘any operation in order that there shall never be any danger of another child coming into the world handicapped.’

The cavalier nature indicates that eugenic sterilisations were done to disabled people extensively, albeit surreptitiously

He was not alone. Through the 1930s, dozens of ordinary people reached out to the Eugenics Society seeking help in accessing surgical sterilisation procedures. Their reasons and circumstances varied. Approaches came from women who had experimented with birth-control methods of varying effectiveness and often exclusionary cost, and – like many families today who opt for vasectomies – saw in sterilisation a reliable, permanent alternative. Husbands wrote in desperation, worried that their wives’ broken bodies would not survive the trials of another pregnancy and labour. Others, like Mr H, considered themselves to be disabled, and feared perpetuating their own heritable ‘defects’. Even if they considered themselves ‘healthy’, some women asked for sterilisations because of ‘feeble-minded’ children in their extended families, demonstrating the impact of the Eugenics Society’s long campaign to formally classify and segregate the ‘feeble-minded’ as a distinct group. One woman recounted the loss of her three-month-old baby following an operation to ‘fix’ his cleft lip. Though she herself was ‘normal’, her doctor advised that the trait was ‘inherited according to the laws of Mendel’. Desiring only ‘physically perfect’ children, she turned to sterilisation.

Letter from Mr H of Stoke-on-Trent, UK. Courtesy the Wellcome Collection

Typed facsimile of Mr H’s letter. Courtesy the Wellcome Collection

Enquiries were always answered, usually by the general secretary of the Eugenics Society, Carlos Paton Blacker, who advised on outmanoeuvring current legal barriers, which prohibited sterilisation in public hospitals for anything other than therapeutic reasons (ie, to cure disease or prevent risk to life). For operations to go ahead, a clear medical benefit must be demonstrated, as Blacker explained to a doctor in Cavendish Square, London, who hoped to sterilise a blind pregnant girl whom he considered to be a ‘borderline … mental defective’. Though sterilisation of ‘defectives’ could not be legally justified on eugenic grounds, it would be perfectly legal to perform the procedure, ‘if, for instance, the girl’s pelvic measurements were on the small side’, rendering childbirth a danger to her life. Or, Blacker continued, the doctor could come up with some other reason to suggest that childbirth may be dangerous and justify the operation in that way. The cavalier nature of these recommendations indicates that eugenic sterilisations were done to disabled people extensively, albeit surreptitiously.

The Eugenics Society was astute, and found ways around legal roadblocks. They maintained an extensive network of like-minded surgeons, willing to perform the operation for a fee. Blacker elaborated that: ‘Though it is illegal to sterilise mental defectives it is nevertheless done to a considerable extent in this country on the quiet, generally by parents who can afford to pay surgeon’s fees.’ (Emphasis added.) This was not top-down, state-mandated coercive eugenic sterilisation… but eugenic sterilisation it was.

What of the poor and working-class men and women who desired sterilisation but could not afford the surgeon’s fee? Here, the Eugenics Society took on a direct, though covert, role. Sterilisation candidates who were deemed worthy – that is, eugenically ‘undesirable’ – would be put in touch with a willing surgeon, their operation covered personally by well-to-do members of the Eugenics Society’s council.

Their letters reveal a hidden network of eugenic sterilisation in interwar Britain. They also provide rare glimpses of how disabled people understood and engaged with eugenics. What is perhaps surprising is how many of them did so positively, in some cases seeking to use it as a means of claiming agency over their own bodies and reproductive lives.

Mr H, his ‘defects’ notwithstanding, was proud that he was able to work and earn enough to support his family, adding that he had ‘walked without aid from two years old and can do most things with my hands a normal person can.’

But he could not afford the expensive sterilisation procedure.

He was a willing participant who used the Eugenics Society to further his bodily and reproductive agency

Blacker wrote to a friend of his who worked at Guy’s Hospital in London to ask him to take on the case, reassuring him that ‘the legal risk in these cases is, presumably, negligible’. The surgeon initially baulked at doing the operation at a public hospital, and Blacker had to reach out to another candidate. Mr H urged Blacker on, encouraging him to canvass Eugenics Society members to raise the money for his treatment.

One doctor offered to pay half the surgeon’s fees and Major Leonard Darwin (son of Charles Darwin, and president of the Eugenics Society) sent in a cheque to cover the stay in hospital. Eventually, a surgeon in Leicester (100 miles north of London) agreed to do the operation for a ‘nominal’ payment.

Mr H wrote following the procedure to express his relief and thanks: ‘my mind is relieved of a terrible anxiety.’ He told Blacker of his hopes that ‘there will be an opportunity some time to do something to help in the work you are trying to do through the Eugenics Society.’ A few months later, Blacker responded to encourage him to write about his personal experiences of sterilisation in the national press and stage-managed a media campaign designed to alleviate working-class opposition to the 1931 Eugenics Society’s Sterilisation Bill. Though the Bill ultimately failed, Mr H asked Blacker to pass on his private details to any applicants in similar circumstances to his own, so he could reassure them through his ‘personal testimony of [the] effects and benefits of sterilisation’. He wanted to share his lived experience as a disabled man with an imagined community of other working-class disabled people – specifically to further the goals of eugenics.

Mr H, it seems, was a willing participant in the eugenic project who used the Eugenics Society to further his bodily and reproductive agency. Considering lived experience of disability and eugenics as co-constitutive in this way flies in the face of what we thought we knew about these respective histories. We think of the eugenicist and the disabled person antagonistically, as perpetrator and victim. But it turns out their aims and interactions have long been entangled.

Palms facing downwards, the hands are drawn from above, from the perspective of their owner. On the right-hand side, the hand is large, and three fingers are regularly spaced next to one much larger finger, comprised of what is usually the index and middle finger together. Accompanying it, a left hand is drawn as if it is trying to get away from the hand next to it, all five fingers plus a thumb are bent as though blown by a strong wind. Drawn in pencil on purple graph paper and strongly reminiscent of the handprints that children bring home from nursery to show proud parents, they create an extraordinarily arresting image. Confronted by them, you feel as though their owner is waving at you, demanding your attention.

Courtesy the Wellcome Collection

These hands indeed demand an attention they have not received, so far. They live within an extraordinarily well-studied archive, the papers of Britain’s Eugenics Society, held since the 1980s at the Wellcome Collection in London. Generations of scholars have combed through this collection, yet the hands, and the wider corpus of letters from sterilisation-seekers have, apparently, been studiously ignored. Together, these materials tell us that sterilisations took place in Britain in a way that contradicts all previous narratives of eugenics on these shores. They also provide rare and startling instances of something that is notably missing from most historical scholarship on eugenics: the perspectives and voices of disabled people.

The story these hands hold has not been told. Nor have other similar stories. Why?

The first reason is practical. Though these materials are neither secret nor hidden, they are hard to find, even with the Wellcome Collection’s recent digitisation efforts, which made much of the Eugenics Society archive freely available online. Yet the organisation of the archive renders its various contents more or less visible. If you are interested in the eugenic activities of a notable figure, the writer Aldous Huxley, say, you can easily find a file under the sub-folder ‘people’ which contains all his correspondence with the Eugenics Society. Traces of ‘ordinary’ people are more difficult to find, and ‘disabled’ people even more so. As disability historians have pointed out, ‘disability’ is very rarely tagged in archival metadata, pushing scholars to develop unique methods to recover disabled voices in hostile archives never designed to amplify them. The letters from which we have quoted are scattered in various subfolders filed under opaque headings such as ‘general’ and ‘miscellaneous items’. The relative ease of navigating digital as opposed to physical archives renders their serendipitous discovery more likely. Still, if you don’t already know they’re there, you’d have little reason to look for them, and little chance of finding them. We were lucky.

Even in the age of digital scholarship, locating sources such as these that capture disabled perspectives remains difficult. It’s especially difficult if you aren’t looking for them.

Eugenics is something that happened to disabled people, never something they did

Serious historical scholarship on eugenics in Britain took off in the 1970s and ’80s. A recurrent theme in the resultant body of literature concerns whether the essence of British eugenics was primarily classist or, like its American counterpart, racist. (We might say, why not both?) The class/race dyad squeezes out the group that has undoubtedly been the most enduring target of eugenic intervention both in Britain and elsewhere: the disabled. This is not to suggest that such categories are mutually distinct. Clearly, they aren’t. Mr H’s identities as disabled and as working class were equally important in shaping his particular engagement with eugenics. The overlapping of race and disability is starkly apparent in another letter from a man who considered himself disabled both because he wore glasses and because he was ‘the result of a mixed marriage’ and therefore suffered from ‘racial troubles’. In this example, race was itself disabling.

It is surprising how few histories of eugenics (and there are many) foreground disability. Even fewer make a serious effort to incorporate the perspectives of disabled people. If present at all, disabled people are too often cast as passive, silent victims. Certainly, they rarely feature as active agents or participants. Eugenics is something that happened to disabled people, never something they did.

One important way of challenging victimhood narratives is to recast ‘victims’ as ‘survivors’. But what about those cases when individuals explicitly claimed victim status? Taking such instances seriously need not erase but can, in fact, highlight the agency of disabled people within our histories of eugenics.

Mr H, a working-class disabled man, was a victim. But not in the way we tend to imagine. He tells us as much. In the course of his letters to the Eugenics Society, Mr H consistently presented himself as a victim not of eugenic policies but of the lack thereof – explaining: ‘I am unfortunately one of the victims waiting for legislation on this vital subject.’ He was neither passive, nor silent in the face of the class oppression that denied him access to the medical procedure he felt he needed. In important ways, he used eugenics to claim ownership over his body, and was a willing participant in the Eugenics Society’s projects. He expressed extreme gratefulness to the society for facilitating his sterilisation and went on to work closely with them to publicise his case, writing eloquently about the need to make voluntary sterilisation available to working-class people. He was a Labour voter but disagreed with the view that the Eugenics Society’s work towards legalising sterilisation was anti-working class, arguing instead that eugenic legislation would be ‘of inestimable benefit’ to the working classes ‘economically as well as Eugenically’. Mr H advised that he would be happy for Blacker to use his personal letters to further the cause, ‘as apart from my personal interest I am in hearty agreement with your aims.’

To identify a historical role for disabled people as occasional eugenic agents is not to let able-bodied eugenicists off the hook. Nor is it to cast disabled people as accomplices in their own oppression. After all, we tend to consider women of the past to have had full epistemic agency, despite their living and participating in patriarchal societies. Mr H was a fluid, articulate and persistent writer who arguably manipulated Blacker, so when we suggest that he was using eugenics to achieve his own ends, we are simply taking him at his words. Disabled people have historically been (and continue to be) subjected to epistemic injustice, even when it comes to testimony about their own health. This makes it especially important to believe historical disabled actors’ statements, even statements that attest to an internalised ableist eugenic logic. Doing so means to recognise more fully than we have done the depth of the historical entanglement between disability and eugenics. Disability (alongside, and intermingled with, the more regularly discussed categories of race and class) has always been central to the eugenic project, to a far greater extent than existing historical scholarship suggests. And eugenics has, at certain times and places, played an important role for some disabled people in the ways they have understood and interacted with their own disabilities.

Telling the story of eugenics as a tale of powerful men oppressing and victimising disabled people fits in with our longstanding cultural templates. It’s a satisfying narrative that contains much truth within it. Indeed, this happened in Britain to a greater extent than we have realised. But clearly, there are other stories to be told.

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