The Working Group in the History of Race and Eugenics (HRE), Centre for Medical Humanities, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Oxford Brookes University invites you to a lecture by Professor Molly Ladd-Taylor (York University, Canada).

The lecture explores explores the underside of the postwar US “child-centred society,” focusing specifically on the tensions between eugenic and biomedical explanations for children’s problems and an emphasis on psychology, cultural deprivation, and faulty parenting. Ultimately, I am interested in the ways that contested ideas about children’s potential were at the center of postwar US political realignments and an increasingly
punitive state.

About the speaker:
Professor Ladd-Taylor is an internationally renowned scholar of women’s health, maternal and child welfare policy, and eugenics in the United States. She is the author of Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (2017) and editor of ‘Bad’ Mothers: The Politics of Blame in 20th Century America (1998, co-ed. with Lauri Umansky).