I wonder what it's like to be well-born...

[spuzzlightyear.livejournal.com]

Comments

[67threnody.livejournal.com]

I really, really, want to see those course materials.

[glitterberrys.livejournal.com]

ditto.

[sandoz-iscariot.livejournal.com]

Creepy.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_purple_monkey_/]

nice!
what year is this?

[spuzzlightyear.livejournal.com]

1913.

[nosyparker.livejournal.com]

Wow. Nice lady.

The National Purity Evangelist for the WCTU served as a lecturer for the National Purity Association, and a lecturer of the Correspondence School of Gospel and Scientific Eugenics. Her 1906 marriage manual, The Way of God in Marriage, exemplified an effort to weave scientific and biblical authority together into a virtually seamless argument. For this author, whose name was Mary E. Teats, children in the womb could be permanently injured not only by alcohol, but also by sexual intercourse during gestation and even by the mother's thought processes while carrying her child. Echoing the starkly elitist rhetoric of activists in the eugenical sterilization movement, she proclaimed:

"The great and rapidly increasing army of idiots, insane, imbeciles, blind, deaf-mutes, epileptics, paralytics, the murderers, thieves, drunkards and moral perverts are very poor material with which to "subdue the world," and usher in the glad day when "all shall know the Lord, whom to know aright is life everlasting." There are hundreds and thousands of men and women today to whom in the interests of future generations, some rigid law should say, "Write this one childless." Men and women whose habits of life are such as to curse their offspring, should be prohibited from marrying."

In a later section, she connected such unfortunates with Malachi's prophetic rebuke of postexilic Israel's offering of blind, lame, and sick animals as sacrifices. She scoffed at the notion that "the lame, halt, deaf, blind, mutes, imbeciles, idiots, drunkards and moral perverts" could be properly called "God-given children," or considered a proper offering and gift to God.

(Source (http://www.ethicsandmedicine.com/archive/18/summer02_commentary3.php))

But I am a morally perverted idiot. So what do I know?

[mwittier.livejournal.com]

I would very much like to go back in time and punch her quite hard, right in the spectacles.