From “Moron” to Maladjusted”: Eugenics, Psychiatry and the Regulation of Women, Ontario, 1930s-1960s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the early 1900s, the eugenics movement spurred a number of major developments in Ontario, among them the committal of large numbers of women to the Ontario Hospital, Cobourg under diagnoses of mental defect. A tool of reproductive control, institutionalization was meant to inhibit “feebleminded” women’s procreative capacities. Despite the absence of enabling legislation, evidence suggests eugenic sterilizations also occurred in the province. Drawing on the detailed patient case files of women confined to the Cobourg facility from the mid1930s to mid1960s, this dissertation re-examines the history of eugenics in Ontario to demonstrate not only its profound impact in the decades prior to the Second World War, but also its enduring effects in the postwar era. To illustrate eugenics’ lingering impact, the study explores the interconnections between diagnoses linked to intellectual disabilities and emergent postwar psychiatric classifications of personality disorders to show how eugenics and psychiatric regulation were re-framed after the 1940s and applied to broader groups of women. Examining disability as both a category of analysis and a discursive construct, the dissertation argues that eugenicists re-scripted the notion of mentally ‘unfit’ into a concept of ‘maladjustment’ in the postwar years, and then applied it more broadly to justify and advance inequitable social relations across a range of social identities. Eugenics operated both materially and discursively as a mechanism through which particular configurations of gender, race, class, and sexuality, along with disability, were established and regulated. It was ultimately in and through early-twentieth-century eugenics that the ‘bio’ and ‘social’ collided, facilitating new notions of citizenship, modes of state governance, and the emergence of the modern bio-political state.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".