This dissertation is a sociological study of the emergence of eugenics as an expertise in early 20th century America. In reckoning with eugenics as a case of expertise legitimization, I seek to not only contribute to the study of eugenic legacies and roots but also examine it as a collaborative project that relied on various frameworks of knowledge production to be realized. Eugenics was first introduced in 1893 by Francis Galton, a British statistician who coined the term to describe the science of a “good birth”. Galton built on a growing movement that suggested scientific intervention might address fears about shifting population demographics at the end of the nineteenth century. These fears, motivated by racism, xenophobia, ableism, and sexism, manifested in an international movement for reproductive control. The resulting eugenic interventions were categorized as positive (encouraging the reproduction of the “fit” through education and social and financial incentives) and negative (preventing the reproduction of the “unfit” through sterilization, incarceration, and the prevention of marriage). Here I draw on archival sources including medical journals, conference records, and newspapers to analyze the mechanisms through which eugenics was legitimized as an actionable science and how stakeholders engaged with its unsettled nature to negotiate their power.

In the first chapter, “Expertise and the ‘New Science’ of Eugenics,” I show how medicine legitimized eugenics as a science through a process of “expertise laundering” in which it claimed authority over eugenic interventions while obscuring the science behind these interventions. The second chapter, “‘Misconceived, Misinterpreted, and Misapplied’: How Dissent Shapes Eugenics and the Scientific Process,” extends this analysis of scientific legitimization by exploring how dissent from within medicine structured eugenic interventions and became part of the process of scientific authentication, ultimately motivating a turn away from positive eugenics and toward negative eugenics. In chapter three, “‘Eugenics Brought Home’: White Women Physicians and Reproductive Authority”, I theorize white women physicians’ engagement with the eugenic project as both responsible for and subject to eugenic demands on white motherhood. I argue that they linked their identities as white women to specific moral and technical expertise to gain authority over eugenic intrusions into the home, thereby linking their professional advancement with their participation in reproductive surveillance and control. These chapters each deal with the historical ramifications of eugenics while pointing to the ongoing legacies of eugenic logic on current and future scientific interventions. This research contributes to studies of scientific knowledge construction, demonstrating how unsettled experts differently draw on unsettled sciences to manage professional, social, and ethical challenges.