Preliminary Programme

This paper explores the relationship between international eugenics networks and Argentine biomedical and population experts in the 1930s and 1940s. It seeks to reconstruct the history of eugenics in Argentina by rewriting it into the larger context of international race science. It examines the intersection between local and universal knowledge and the role played by biomedical experts as cultural mediators-translators/interpreters of cryptic scientific language-in this process. The investigation will first map out the international dimension of the eugenics movement between the early 1900s and the late 1930s. Next, it will sketch out the reception of European and U.S. ideas on race improvement in Latin America and Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, it will address the institutionalization of a eugenic field in Argentina in the 1930s and 1940s. Half a century after Francis Galton had first introduced the term into (1883), eugenics had become a growing international movement. Associations to promote its cause blossomed everywhere from Europe and the United States to Latin America. Their representatives met at three international and widely publicized conferences in London and New York as well as at other smaller regional meetings-such as the Nordic and Pan-American Eugenics Conferences. Moreover, eugenics achieved academic recognition after it was institutionalized in prestigious scientific centers, such as the Galton Laboratory (Britain), the Eugenics Records Office (U. S.), the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut (Germany), the Institut d'Anthropologie (France), the Institute of Biotypology (Italy) and the Uppsala Institute for Race Research (Sweden).
By the early 1930s Mexico, Brazil and Argentina had well-established eugenics organizations. Due to her sizable immigrant population and close ties to Europe, Argentina in particular was very well integrated into international eugenics networks. Created in 1932, the Asociación Argentina de Biotipología, Eugenesia y Medicina Social (Argentine Society of Biotypology, Eugenics and Social Medicine, hereafter ASB) became the country's leading eugenics organization. Argentine medical and demographic experts cultivated personal and institutional ties with eugenicists abroad. The founder of Italian fascist biotypology, Nicola Pende, visited Argentina and published regularly in the Argentine eugenic press. Likewise, hundreds of Argentine and South American medical students and doctors visited Nazi Germany on official tours. Shortly after its creation, the ASB established the School of Biotypology to train professional eugencists. By the mid-1930s, economic depression and xenophobia brought extreme proposals, such as selective immigration, marriage restrictions, and forced sterilization into the agenda of biomedical experts and policy makers. Neither the horrors of Nazism nor the discoveries of modern genetics discredited completely eugenics in Argentina. By the early years of the Peronist regime (1947), more than five hundred eugenic experts had graduated from the School of Biotypology and were rapidly absorbed into the booming public sector. In 1955 eugenics achieved academic status when a private university in Buenos Aires set up the first School of Integral Eugenics and Humanism. (Show less)

My paper explores the adaptation of eugenics theories in Mexico during the 1930s. By looking at the Sociedad Mexicana de Eugenesia, my paper analyzes
the tensions between the eugenics research as a part of biology and its application in social reforms. In so doing, I attempt to see how these
historical tensions played political and social roles in the making —and
remaking-- of the post revolutionary national-state. By looking at the
tensions between social explanations of anthropology and medicine,
furthermore, my paper challenges the foundational eugenics theories and attempts, most significaly, to explain the gap (or distance) between the discourses on socio-biological transformation and its implementation. (Show less)

A new generation ,"sound mind in a sound Body", was the ultimate end of the prolonged Israeli nation building process.
The process , which took place at the beginning of the last century, aimed to re-create the Jewish nation by relocating it in the promised land in one hand, and by establishing a new native Jew, on the other. This ideological theme was shared by national leaders and doctors as well, and demanded of mothers to have a lot of children and to raise them according to specific rules and orders. Their was to raise -
Doctors and national leaders praised birth and its national benefits, and glorified motherhood. But they were quiet worried because of the low birth rates in the urban and educated strata, and from the high birth rates of the poor and uneducated- both Jewish Immigrants and poor Arab residence of the country. The doctors wrote in Israeli women magazines of the 30's and 40s about an anti-reproduction social sentiment and about the fear from bearing children.
This social phenomenon was accompanied by vast usage of abortions. Abortions were illegal in the British Mandate period, unless for health reasons. “The medical reasons, as you all know, are highly subjective” wrote one of the doctors, Dr. Josef Meier, when he turned to his collages to try to stop the abortions.
Using content analysis, articles from the Israeli women magazines (Mainly Haisha and Dvar Hapoelet) will be discussed in order to conceptualize the significance of abortions in the Israeli nation building Process.
The Abortion discourse in the Israeli women's magazines of the time drew the lines between the explicit calls of famous doctors and political leaders to stop abortions out of national, social and medical reasons, and the anonymous objections of single women who wrote in favor of free abortions. Part of the doctors openly favored abortions for the poor and the uneducated, but not for middle-class urban women. In this unique set of political and social circumstances, religious arguments from one side and feminist arguments from the other, made surprisingly little significance comparing their essential position in the contemporary abortion debate in Israel. (Show less)