(Jewish Group) You must watch Ken Burns' PBS series on America and the Holocaust

[3catwoman3]

3. I was totally surprised when Helen Keller was listed...

Last edited Mon Sep 19, 2022, 03:53 PM - Edit history (2)

...as a supporter of eugenics.

I've read just a bit about that since watching last night, and apparently she later moved away from this stance, but it shocked me. Surely, she would have been picked out and eliminated as defective, so how she could even briefly support any element of eugenics just doesn't seem to fit.

Here is an excerpt from one of the sources I looked at:

One recent Keller biography, written by disability studies professor Kim Nielsen, advances a number of important criticisms of Keller’s disability politics.34 She correctly condemns an article written by Keller in 1915 during a brief moment when she had adopted certain eugenicist ideas.35 Influenced greatly by her friend and then-comrade Margaret Sanger, Keller conflated the struggle for birth control and reproductive self-determination with the broader social goal of ensuring the “fitness” of future generations. To be fair, Keller never supported the more odious and racist aspects of eugenic philosophy, such as forced sterilization (a practice legalized by the US Supreme Court in 1927). In any event, within a matter of years, Keller was writing articles denouncing the entire “survival of the fittest” mentality upon which eugenics was founded, not only in Nazi Germany, but in the United States as well.

Source - https://isreview.org/issue/96/politics-helen-keller/index.html