McDonald, Ruth Marina2024-08-142024-08-1419961996https://hdl.handle.net/1828/18912In 1928 Alberta became the first province in Canada to enact eugenic sterilization legislation. Under the "Sexual Sterilization Act," a four member eugenics board was created and given the authority to order the sterilization of patients about to be released from mental hospitals. Eugenic in its motivation, this Act was established in order to prevent the transmission of "feeble-mindedness" and "insanity" to future generations. By the time of the Act's repeal in 1972 close to three thousand individuals had been sterilized. To date, no comprehensive contextual study has been done of this program. This thesis provides an analysis of the development of this social policy from its first discussion early in the province's history through to the formation and implementation of the "Sexual Sterilization Act. " Beyond situating this eugenic-minded program in its historical context, the thesis also deconstructs the very language upon which this policy was based in order to reveal the complex process through which race, class, gender and ability relations were defined. In Alberta in the first decades of the twentieth century, due to the influence of the eugenics movement, discourses on mental disability were seldom sympathetic. Feeble-mindedness was defined according to Anglo­ Saxon middle-class assumptions about race, class, gender and ability. More specifically feeble-mindedness was defined as a largely foreign, lower-class and frequently female problem. During the 1920's growing fears of the "menace of the feeble-minded" inspired activists to launch a campaign for the compulsory sterilization of this problem group. Dominated by maternal feminists such as Emily Murphy and Irene Parlby, the campaign was not the work of the province's arch-reactionaries. Bound up within their discourse on sterilization these women elevated the status of their roles as "mothers of the race" by denying motherhood to those deemed "unfit". When the proposed sexual sterilization bill was introduced in the Legislative Assembly it sparked significant debate. Despite objections raised on moral, libertarian and scientific grounds, the fundamental justifications for such legislation went unchallenged. Opponents and supporters alike did not challenge the reality of the threat of the feeble-minded and accepted the ethnocentric assumptions upon which the bill was based. These assumptions were institutionalized by the implementation of the "Sexual Sterilization Act." Out of the 2,832 individuals who were sterilized in Alberta between 1928 and 1972, the majority occupied disadvantaged positions within society. The effect of the Sexual Sterilization Act, even if it was not its avowed intention was to reinforce the privilege of the Anglo-Protestant elite at the expense of all "others".155 pagesAvailable to the World Wide WebThesis