Defective data: statistics, disability, and eugenic sterilisation in interwar Britain

Journal article

This article is concerned with the history of eugenic sterilisation in Britain through the 1920s and 30s. In this period, the Eugenics Society mounted an active but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to legalise the voluntary surgical sterilisation of various categories of people, including those deemed ‘mentally deficient’ or ‘defective’. We take as our explicit focus the propaganda produced and disseminated by the Eugenics Society as part of this campaign, and especially the various kinds of data mobilised therein. The parliamentary defeat of the Society’s Sterilisation Bill in July 1931 marks, we argue, a significant shift in the tactics of the campaign. Before this, the Eugenics Society framed sterilisation as a promising method for eradicating, or at least significantly reducing the incidence of, inherited ‘mental defect’. Subsequently, they came to emphasise the inequality of access to sterilisation between rich and poor, (re)positioning theirs as an egalitarian campaign aimed at extending a form of reproductive agency to the disadvantaged. These distinct phases of the campaign were each supported by different kinds of propaganda material, which in turn centred very different kinds of data. As the campaign evolved, the numbers and quantitative rhetoric which typified earlier propaganda materials gave way to a more qualitative approach, which notably included the selective incorporation of the voices of people living with hereditary ‘defects’. As well as exposing a rupture in the Eugenics Society’s propagandistic data practices, this episode underlines the need to further incorporate disabled dialogues and perspectives in our histories of eugenics.

Authors: Aylward, A; McGuire, C

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Journal: Medical History
• Publication date: 2025-07-18
• Acceptance date: 2025-05-14
• DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2025.10014
• EISSN: 2048-8343
• ISSN: 0025-7273
• Language: English
• Keywords: eugenics; data; mental deficiency; propaganda; sterilisation; disability