PUTTING OVER EUGENICS 



Making It a Living Force Depends on Sound Application of Psychology and 



Sociology— Camp Fire Girls an Organization Which Will Create Eugenic 



Ideals in Women in an Indirect but Effective Way 



A. E. Hamilton. 

 Extension Department, Eugenics Record Office, Spring Harbor, Long Island, N. Y. 



ONE of the finest women, phys- 

 ically, mentally, spiritually, that 

 I have been honored to meet in 

 my lecture travels told me 

 that she and her sisters had refrained 

 from marriage because* her family tree 

 showed branches withered by tuber- 

 culosis. 



One of the brainest and brawniest 

 young men I have ever known told me 

 recently that the process of trying to 

 rationalize his emotions and bring them 

 into line with his intellectual content 

 regarding fitness for marriage had led 

 him to leave the side of the woman who 

 would have made a splendid wife had 

 they married, and betake himself to 

 the solitary ways of scientific research. 



One of the most sympathetic and 

 child-loving men who has crossed my 

 path writes of breaking an engagement 

 on the score of finding doubtfully 

 dysgenic influences in the family of his 

 sweetheart, of falling in love with 

 another admirable young woman and 

 then tearing himself out again because of 

 something he deemed not quite fitting 

 in her hereditary constitution, and of 

 finding another girl who seemed quite 

 eugenically built, but who turned him 

 down gently but flatly when he sug- 

 gested that they be married for the 

 sake of wellbornness in children. 



And I might go on recording more of 

 this sicklying o'er with the pale cast of 

 bluegenic thought the young minds of 

 potential parents, which seems to me 

 almost the net result of many of the well- 

 intended but myopic endeavors hitherto 

 made to put over Galton's idea to the 

 coming generation. Perhaps it is time 

 for those of us who have the welfare of 

 Eugenics at heart to ask ourselves 

 what there is in a monograph on 

 albinism, a study of the inheritance of 



idiocy, or a lecture on the declining 

 birth-rate in college women or American 

 men of science, to promote a desire on 

 the part of our fittest young people for 

 marriage and parenthood — for if that 

 be not the keynote of Eugenics, then I 

 sadly misconstrue the meaning of the 

 word. 



To which it may be answered that 

 all our normal young folks de.sire 

 marriage and parenthood — whereupon 

 the question becomes ; Do they desire it 

 enough to overcome the obstacles, 

 psychological, social and economic, that 

 are thrust in their way because the 

 conscious attention of those who should 

 be educators and leaders has not been 

 turned on these problems sufficiently 

 to make a dent in them? Marriage 

 and parenthood must ever remain 

 matters of desire, and the work before 

 the true promoter of Eugenics is that 

 of social engineering which will make 

 for the realization of desire in the 

 whole.somest and quickest way. The 

 man whose genius has given us the 

 first self-supporting social institution 

 designed for the most genuine race- 

 betterment puts the challenge thus, 

 "Can you develop the geniuses who 

 will parallel in the social world what 

 our inventors have done in the world 

 of steam and electricity? Can you 

 then create social self-supporting in- 

 stitutions that shall take these social 

 inventions and so put the power of 

 organization, publicity and finance be- 

 hind them that they shall be as wide 

 spread as the telephone, the movies or 

 the telegraph!"" In the organization 

 of the Camp Fire Girls, the brain child 

 of Doctor and Mrs. Luther Halsey 

 Gulick, we have the pioneer type of 

 such self-reliant and self-supporting 

 institutions as will doubtless spring up 



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