Vermont not racist? You forgot about eugenics

Neither my mother nor my grandmother was what you’d call “domesticated.” My mother did not sew, nor did she mend. Nor, for that matter, did she reap spinach, or process it into little freezer packages.

My grandmother may have been the last word in thrift, saving bits of string and piles of newsprint that might come in handy someday, but she was happiest out in the woods with a walking stick.

Domestic failures, both of them, leaving it up to the Home Economics teacher to supply me with basic sewing skills and the ability to combine two varieties of canned soup into something novel and dubiously nutritious.

Many of my generation can get downright nostalgic about Home Economics, domestic skills 101, the basics. But by the time I was in a home ec class, girls had started to chafe at the assumption that boys didn’t need to know how to do household chores. The shine and polish with which the role of domestic goddess had been burnished since the 1920s was starting to wear rather thin. Some of us had even become downright insistent that we be allowed to enter the hallowed grounds of the shop class, with its tools too dangerous and complicated for a girl, and its skills that promised a paycheck.

Vermont is 94.2 percent ethnically white, and I’ve heard Vermonters argue that they aren’t racist, and have never been touched or participated in the institutional racism which redlined minority housing, suppressed black votes, or created the racial profiling which defines the U.S. penal system.

Nevertheless, all across Vermont, we have been impacted by racism.

Back in the 1970s, when the sewing machines whirred, little did we know we were some of the last participants in a great experiment in racist-based eugenics spanning half a century.

Home Economics, the class that taught me how to set a zipper, had its roots firmly planted in prejudice, racism, and the eugenics vision of building a better (white) American.

Just as China instituted the one-child rule to gain control over its population, there was, in early 20th century America, a terrible panic over undesirable immigration and weakness in the white gene pool, which spurred eugenicists and government to work together to encourage “appropriate” breeding and, to a lesser extent, the sterilizing of undesirable populations.

And lest you think this is all ancient history, Vermont, which sterilized over 250 people (mostly women), only ended the practice in 1965 — 55 years ago.

So, at the turn of the 20th century, when our story begins, the idea that you could build a better society free from immigrant influences, degenerates (a wide catchall category that included the disabled, alcoholics and Catholics), and “the Negro” was extremely attractive. Eugenicists envisioned a rural countryside much like the fictitious Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” And white, of course.

Except at the time, Lake Wobegon was not a “little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve,” but a town that needed to be built. And built on a grand scale, across much of rural America.

The Roaring Twenties is a complicated time for rural America. Great wealth and privilege, flaunted and lauded, masked massive poverty. Rural children were suffering from an epidemic of pellagra, a disease caused by a lack of niacin. Symptoms of pellagra include inflamed skin, which appears first in skin exposed to sunlight or friction, sores in the mouth, diarrhea, and dementia.

In areas where corn played a large role in the diet, children fared poorly. Alarms were being raised over “defective” rural children. 

Social reformers, including the those in the budding field of Home Economics, rallied together to impress upon rural women new ideals in hygiene and nutrition, but their focus was not universal; it was targeted, and strategic, focusing on those considered the worthy, or deserving, poor. The fact that those who fell outside of that category naturally fell behind was attributed not to being barred from these programs, but to the genetics that kept them from being the idealized Eurocentric embodiment of perfection.

There was nothing subtle about it. Working with farm organizations, 4-H for example, pageants were established in 1922 to select the healthiest farm girl and boy in the nation, at the same shows where they exhibited livestock. While 4-H did establish black chapters, and chapters for the “Native American Indian,” segregation kept these children from participating in the contests, which established the default standard of healthy rural beauty typical of the Norman Rockwell ideal.

The home ec movement envisioned not only a racially homogenous countryside, but rigidly specific gender roles, taking the forward-facing economic roles away from women while encouraging them to apply their energies to learning and mastering the new standards of child rearing.

This was no mean undertaking. While the beef industry had been consolidated to the Chicago packing yards, farm goods that weren’t beef (or grain), such as dairy, eggs, vegetables and fruits, were still considered women’s work around the turn of the 20th century.

For hundreds of years (and still in parts of the world where traditional agriculture is the norm), rural farm women did the value-added work: They churned the butter, washed the eggs, cleaned the vegetables, and packed the fruit. And they ran the business side, the buying of feed and the selling of eggs, for example.

There is a moment in time where the way things were collides perfectly with the way the eugenicists and social reformers imagined it should be. In 1928, the Textile Bag Manufacturers Association — The people manufacturing the cloth bags used as feed sacks — realized the importance of catering to women. 

In 1928 the association published a book “Sewing With Flour Bags, “in recognition of the importance of packaging feed for the baby chick business to appeal to women because “women folk with their motherly instincts seem to be developing their entrepreneurial skills better than men.”

And those women, with entrepreneurial skills, running businesses, were a problem. Because if they were running businesses, they were not getting on with the more important task of raising children using the latest scientific research from this new field of Home Economics.

Motherhood and apple pie? It was a campaign designed to create rigid gender expectations, to encourage the creation of a healthy — but, by design, white — population that conformed to the designer’s prejudices as to who, among the rural poor, was suitable and desirable.

If you believe “capitalism” is why chickens are raised by corporations in battery cages, you’ve only learned half the story. Agribusiness, across much of the spectrum, is a byproduct of the eugenics and Home Economics movement’s drive to improve health and viability of rural white stock.

Did these movements improve lives? Arguably yes, of course they did, but let’s not overlook the fact that not all lives mattered to these people. Only the right lives.

And by the 1970s, when Home Economics was still teaching obsolete and unmarketable skills to another generation of women, the goals of the movement — to keep women out of the workforce and at home raising children — were as antiquated as the discredited field of eugenics from which they sprang.

These weren’t Southern white supremacists in white robes, or part of a crowd making a holiday out of a lynching.

They were academics and scholars, cloaking their racism in economic growth and a better society. They believed, fervently, that some lives mattered much more than others, so they sterilized the least desirable, those deemed defective or immoral (records will show a number of women were sterilized for the unforgivable crime of having a child out of wedlock).

And they reshaped rural society to produce a vision of wholesomeness that led Keillor to close his monologue, without a trace of irony, with “a little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.”

Tamara Burke lives in Craftsbury, works in Stowe.