The Language of Reproductive Control: The Social Welfare Sector’s Approach to Managing Low-Income and Minority Communities in North Carolina during the 1950s

This preliminary research investigates racial, gender, and class biases through the language and coded terms used by welfare policies and the social welfare sector in North Carolina during the 1950s. Previous scholarship has explored biases within eugenic sterilization programs. However, scholars have yet to analyze on how social welfare sectors and welfare policies, despite their attempt to support low-income people and minorities, justified the reproductive constraint of low-income people and minorities by using language and eugenic rhetoric. This research applied interdisciplinary scholarship–including literature on reproductive rights, the politics of the body, and theories on race–to the analysis of language used within sterilization requests and archival public welfare records. As a result, this research examined how welfare policies and the social welfare sector targeted marginalized communities based on racist, sexist, and classist ideology. Although historians consider the 1950s as a period of declining influence of eugenics, this research analyzes language within archival records and legislation to reveal how eugenic rhetoric has continue within the social welfare sector and legislation. Therefore, uncovering how language used within policy and welfare programs has justified social and reproductive control over marginalized communities.