It’s been dominating the non-Covid, non-political, non-environmental news for years. Conspiracy theorists post. They picket. They shout from the rooftops. Pop darling icon Britney Spears must be freed, they say. Locked into a strict conservatorship controlled by her father, cemented in place by a judge in 2007 after her very scary, very public breakdown that culminated in a shaved head and an incident with a green umbrella, Britney leads a sheltered life. We are just now learning the extent of the shelter factor and her disdain for the whole ordeal. Even I’ve been guilty of thinking, “So what? So, she’s a millionairess who has someone else taking care of all the pesky details. Must be awful.” Insert eyeroll. But, now that we’re hearing from the source, learning facts like her inability to drive (her driver license is not in her possession), not being able to see a doctor without approval, being forced to wear an IUD contraceptive when she’d like to have a child, yet seemingly being ordered to work on demand (hence her Vegas residency) for a fortune she’s not allowed access to – that makes me squeamish and sad. Poor celebrities, you say. But, wait, this situation is eerily reminiscent of another time and this same place, America. There was a time where it didn’t take much for a woman to be denied the ability to be a mother. I’d like you to meet Ann Cooper Hewitt. She’s the heroine of our story. But first, let’s talk villain. Let’s talk eugenics.
Whether you want to harken back to the indigenous people of Brazil, who were known to practice infanticide against babies born with physical abnormalities, or to the Spartan days when every newborn child was put through an intense inspection by a council of elders who would decide whether they were fit to exist, society has always been vested in improving the genetic quality of the human species. In the US, this desire for the idyllic human specimen to be the norm reached a fever pitch in the 20s & 30s. Without getting too political for you, this began only one decade after women were granted the right to vote. Shockingly, the concept of eugenics was a mainstay of a male dominated society who saw the stain of inferior breeding placed squarely on the shoulders of women. Pardon my facetiousness. So, how does a civilization control superior genetic development? Glad you asked. They decide who can reproduce and who cannot. But, this was so long ago, there was no birth control, right? Correct, astute reader. There was only one way to keep inferior genes from entering into this country. They called it forced sterilization. It was actually quite easy, as a woman, to find yourself vaulted into the “needs to be sterilized” pile. Have a child out of wedlock? Why, folks, we have ourselves a sexual deviant of a woman here. Sterilize her. Unfortunate enough to be poor and have too many children already? Look at this feeble-minded woman, unable to control her sexual desires. Sterilize her. Riding your bicycle through town and spotted talking to a man in broad daylight? Sterilize that Jezebel. Heiress to a late mogul’s fortune where your mother gets the entire inheritance provided she outlives you and you die childless? Sterilize first and contemplate murder later. Poor Ann Cooper Hewitt never stood a chance.
At the age of 3, Ann did the unthinkable. Under her mother’s watchful eye, she was observed with her hand inside of her diaper. By 1920, the child, on official medical documents, was diagnosed as a “feebleminded idiot” who was deemed irreparably damaged, sexually. Not in these official documents was information of the abuse Ann suffered at the hands of her socialite mother, Maryon Cooper Hewitt: bodily marks from an iron, forehead scar from a smashed wine glass, numerous burns from cigarettes. Ann was shipped away to a girl’s school with an explanation from her mother warning of her promiscuity and need to be reprimanded constantly. When one school would notice Ann’s intelligence and pleasant disposition, Maryon would move her “delinquent” daughter to another school. When Ann’s father, Peter Hewitt, died in 1921 and left today’s equivalent of 59 million dollars tied in an oddly complicated codicil, Maryon’s plan took an evil turn. In 1934, finally out of school and invited to an oddly pleasant lunch with her mother, Ann was inexplicably deposited at a hospital where a doctor told her she needed her appendix removed. Ann would awake to both an unnecessarily missing appendix and an absence of fallopian tubes. Though her mother and the operating physician were charged with mayhem, the court chose to drop the case.
This type of activity was rampant in the US. John Rockefeller funded a commission to investigate regulating the sexual deviance of shop girls, factory workers, and anyone deemed low class. Just before 1920, over 15,000 women suspected of having syphilis were held in prison camps. Involuntary sterilization, aka eugenic sterilization, of poor, disabled, and wayward women gained acceptance as a way to purge the population of unsound and undesirable genetic lines. In fact, the reason credited to ending the eugenics sterilization campaign in the US were reports coming in from a similar campaign in Germany. Hitler was pursuing Jews in his maniacal effort to create a utopian society across Europe. America backed off their sterilization campaign.
While we watch the unfolding saga of Britney Spears, feeling either horrified or complacent, it’s important to understand how history has treated some of the involved concepts. There are other things at play in the Spears conservatorship case besides the unwanted contraceptive device. Nevertheless, as a society, we are only as good as our weakest links. Goodbye.
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