Exhumed: Reckoning with the History of Eugenics in Marriage and Family Therapy

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to educate Marriage and Family Therapists about the history of the profession and to call attention to the troubling history of eugenics as it pertains to current ethical practice. The eugenics movement sought to increase the marriage and reproduction of healthy, white people, while implementing a system of institutionalization and sterilization to deter the reproduction of people of color, people with disabilities, and anyone determined to be “undesirable” by eugenicists. The helping professions, including Marriage and Family Therapy arose during the years when this took place, and contributed to the implementation of eugenics in a variety of ways. Founders of the field of Marriage and Family Therapy, including eugenicist Paul Popenoe, also known as the father of marriage counseling, played a key role in linking eugenics ideals and practices with Marriage and Family Therapy. While other professions, and indeed other organizations of all types, have worked to understand their participation in the promotion of eugenics ideals, and have issued apologies along with commitments to function ethically in the future, Marriage and Family Therapy has yet to do so. This article is a call to reckon with our history, to understand it, to educate and to practice ethically in the future.

An ecologically informed transdisciplinary prevention model for Black and Latine family wellbeing

“…Historically, counseling and psychology have been used as tools to enact settler colonialism and white supremacy (Charlot et al, 2022;Jordan, 2021Jordan, , 2022. Pathologizing Indigenous and enslaved persons of African descent as "savage" or "psychologically inferior" and "unfit" for freedom served as the justification for settler cruelties that included genocide, displacement, land dispossession, forced family separation, forced cultural assimilation, forced sterilization, and institutionalization of racialized persons.…”

“…Laws and policies born out of colonialism and white supremacy have specifically withheld the right to marry (i.e., anti-miscegenation laws) or have children (e.g., forced sterilization of women of Indigenous, Black, and Mexican and Puerto Rican descent) (Gutierrez & Fuentes, 2009), the right to land and other property rights, ownership of one's own body, the right to testify against a white person in court, employment rights, and protections against mass incarceration (Gómez et al, 2023;Harris, 1993;MacMullan, 2022;Mills, 2019). Even the father of marriage counseling within the United States, Paul Popenoe, was a proponent of positive eugenics or the promotion of marriage/family life among the right kind of family (Charlot et al, 2022;Jordan, 2021), furthering the influence of family privilege (Letiecq, 2019) for the standard North American family (i.e., white, middle-class, cis-gender, opposite-sex, married, monogamous couples raising their biological children in the family home they own).…”

A special section: Contributions of family science to anti‐racism efforts

“…Like most academic and professional fields, the field of family science both participated in and furthered racism. The early marriage counseling movement included among its membership advocates of eugenics and forced sterilization (Charlot et al., 2022). Also, despite a few notable exceptions, such as structural family therapy (Minuchin et al., 1967), many original family systems theories minimized the role of culture and larger systemic factors in family and individual functioning or were imbued with assumptions that centered and elevated middle‐class, Eurocentric, heterosexual family structures and processes (Kaslow et al., 1995).…”