Book Club Summary and Questions by Clive

April 7 2022

When Ann Cooper Hewitt was 3 years old, she was caught with her hand down her pants.

In the eyes of her mother and doctors back around 1920, this indicated that the girl was irreparably damaged, a “feebleminded” “idiot” with no chance of living a normal life. This began an odyssey of abuse that would later result in her being sterilized without her knowledge.  This book tells the sad and shocking tale of Cooper Hewitt, the daughter of famed engineer and inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt, and how her case reflected a time when eugenics was not only frighteningly common, but widely accepted in the US. Ann Cooper Hewitt sued her mother for something shocking.

Ann’s mother, Maryon Cooper Hewitt, was an abusive parent. In her early 20s, Ann would show a court of law the scar on her forehead from when her mother reportedly smashed a wine glass against it, and a burn on her forearm from her mother’s cigarette. During the court case — wherein she sued her mother for half a million dollars (9 million in today’s money) for having her sterilized without her knowledge — she told of being locked in her room all the time as a child and never being allowed to have friends.

Ann Cooper Hewitt filed a civil suit for $500,000 against her mother Maryon in 1936.

“My mother never came near me,” she testified. “The maid would dress me in the morning, then leave me there for the day. I would often go to sleep in my clothes.” Sadly for Ann, two factors gave her uncaring mother motive and means for an even harsher form of cruelty. When Peter Cooper Hewitt — whose grandfather founded the Cooper Union, and whose father, Abram Hewitt, and uncle, Edward Cooper, were both mayors of New York — died in 1921, his estate was worth over $4 million, the equivalent of $59 million today. According to his will, Ann would receive two-thirds of this, and her mother would receive one-third. 

A caveat, however, stipulated that should Ann die childless, her share would revert back to her mother.

As it happened, this coincided with a time in the US when forced sterilizations were becoming widely accepted throughout the country, including among the medical establishment.

The country’s gender attitudes were so Victorian at the time that the trend of women riding bicycles and stopping to chat with friends was seen as problematic.

“Many worried that intense conversations endangered a woman’s health,” writes Farley. “They had long been told that the gentler sex required rest and seclusion to avoid overtaxing the nervous system.”

In this society, a little girl caught doing something naughty was seen as a sign of irreparable damage.

“As far as Ann’s physicians were concerned, a little girl caught masturbating was sure to become a danger to men and society — that was, if she didn’t obviate the need for men altogether,” Farley writes.

Ann’s forced sterilization orchestrated by her mother Maryon Hewitt (pictured) came at a time in American history where any kind of female sexuality was viewed as highly suspect.

“ ‘Ann is “man-like” in her urges,’ one physician told her mother, after hearing about her alleged fondness for self-gratification. ‘And if she keeps at her nasty habit, she won’t perceive any need to marry one day.’ ”

In this atmosphere, society declared war on promiscuousness, real or imagined. Politicians established “vice commissions,” with funding from John D. Rockefeller, to “regulate the sexual activity of shop girls, factory workers, and other low-class women,” which even included spying on everyday working women to determine their sexual activity. 

“Undercover investigators trailed women from their tenements to their jobs, taking notes on everything from their boots to their professional tasks,” Farley writes. “ ‘There is no question that this woman is on terms of sexual intimacy with her male companions,’ one concluded, having observed a manicurist massaging the hands of businessmen all day.”

This war on women was so intense that the US government imprisoned 15,000 women found to have syphilis between 1914 and 1918. 

“Officials claimed to be preventing the women from infecting US troops, who already had high rates of venereal disease,” Farley writes. “Many of the detained women had committed no crime, such as prostitution; they had simply ventured too close to a military base while walking alone or wearing too high a hemline.” 

Accordingly, involuntary eugenic sterilization of “poor, disabled, and ‘wayward’ individuals” gained quick acceptance as a way to “reduce the number of unsound people in the population.”

Ann’s mother Maryon Hewitt (pictured in court in 1936) was charged with “mayhem” in the case surrounding her daughter’s sterilization, but charges were dropped. Maryon stood to inherit millions from her husband if Ann remained childless, per a stipulation in his will. This gave a mother like Maryon, whose only obstacle to her late husband’s fortune was her daughter’s potential reproduction, easy options. In August 1934, when Ann was 20 and therefore still a minor, she was having lunch with her mother near San Francisco when she felt a rush of pain in her stomach. She was taken to a hospital, where Dr. Tilton Tillman, without ever examining her, told her she had appendicitis.

She received an appendectomy from Dr. Samuel Boyd four days later. During the weeks she spent recovering in the hospital, she heard things that were deeply concerning.

“During this time, she overheard a few staff members ask her nurse how the ‘idiot patient’ was doing,” Farley writes. “Ann also heard her nurse make several phone calls to Dr. Tillman assuring him that his patient ‘didn’t suspect a thing.’ ”

“I learned then that my mother and Dr. Tillman had told everyone that I was a mental case,” Ann later testified. “I discovered that I had undergone a salpingectomy, having my tubes removed along with my appendix.”

Later in her testimony, her attorney asked if she had hoped to marry one day. She replied that she did, then added, “But I don’t know if anyone will have me now.”

Ann filed the civil suit against her mother for $500,000 in January 1936, alleging that Maryon Cooper Hewitt paid the doctors to remove her fallopian tubes without her knowledge or consent. Soon after, the San Francisco district attorney charged Maryon and both doctors with “mayhem,” a rare charge that was “reserved for cases involving the act of disabling or disfiguring an individual  punishable by up to 14 years in prison.”

Ann’s father Peter Cooper Hewitt (from left), pictured here in 1915 with fellow members of the U.S. Naval Consulting board, inventor Thomas Edison and William Lawrence Saunders. He died in 1921.

But a lengthy, exhausting trial resulted in the charges being dropped against the doctors and her mother. Ann settled the civil suit for $150,000. Maryon died following a stroke in April 1939 at age 55. Like her mother, Ann wound up marrying five times, before dying of cancer in February 1956 at age 40.

Incredibly, many states that had laws on the books allowing involuntary sterilization did not begin to repeal them until the 1970s. Farley writes that the Cooper Hewitt family did everything they could to erase the memories of these women from the public imagination, and that only now, with this book, can Ann Cooper Hewitt get the recognition she deserved. “Mortified by the scandalous women and their feud, Peter’s siblings removed papers and records relating to Ann and Maryon from the family’s legacy,” Farley writes. “In trying to remove what they perceived to be a stain on the saga of a great family, the Hewitt siblings helped to erase eugenics from the public memory while upholding the movement’s ideals. The family members may not have bankrolled or publicly supported sterilization campaigns, as many of their peers did, but they shared eugenicists’ disdain for women thought to be disruptive.”

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Peter Cooper, born in 1791, was a well-known industrialist and philanthropist. His inventions ranged from the Tom Thumb steam locomotive to what later on would be known as Jell-O. In 1859, he founded his namesake college, the Cooper Union, in New York City. He died in 1883.

His daughter, Sarah, married Abram Hewitt, who was mayor of New York City in the late 1880s and helped build its first subway line. The couple had six children, including Peter Cooper Hewitt. (Two of the couples daughters, Sarah and Eleanor, founded the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration in 1896. It is now called the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and located on the Upper East Side.)

Hewitt followed in his grandfathers footsteps and was an inventor of note, patenting the mercury vapor lamp, which was widely used for street and outdoor lighting, according to the National Inventors Hall of Fame website.

He married his first wife, Lucy Bond Work, in April 1887.  It is unclear when he met Maryon, but the two carried on an illicit affair, resulting in the birth of Ann in 1914, according to an article. The pair married in 1918. Hewitt died three years later.  Maryon became part of the upper crust when she married Dr. Pedar Brugiere, a California millionaire, in 1902, according to the article. Her background was of a popular Southern belle from Virginia, according to her 1939 New York Times obituary.  While my mother has always boasted of her Southern aristocracy, she was the daughter of a horsecar driver in San Francisco who lived in a flat over a corner grocery store when she was a girl, Ann claimed, according to the History Magazine article.   Married five times, Maryon lived extravagantly, with the Times obituary noting: On one of her frequent trips between Europe and America she wore a diamond-studded anklet valued at $100,000. She also had earned the nickname the greatest woman gambler in Europe.  During the trial, Ann testified to her mothers abusive behavior toward her. She never had any affection for me, none whatsoever. She would drink all night and drag me out of bed at four in the morning to tell me if Id die shed have all my money. Shed be drunk and mistreat me, throwing up to me that I was a love child.  Ann said she was locked up and did not have boyfriends, which belied Maryons claims about her daughters behavior.

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Questions.

1. The idea behind eugenics was a movement to protect the purity of the white race, but isn’t it any different from the Nazi movements related to race?
2. According to psychologists at the time, it was household workers who tended to introduce perversion into respectable homes, corrupting wellborn individuals like Ann.  Is it really possible for “class” to “corrupt” people?  
3. As in the early 20th century, when eugenics first flourished, there was wide-spread contempt and fear that non-whites gaining dominance. Isn’t it true that this is racism and not about a better society?
4. Why do so many white people fall for the myth that dark-skinned people are to blame for their troubles?
5. Before she died at 41 Ann often appealed to her wealth and lineage to disparage other women, including one whose husband she stole. Do you think she ever seemed to realize how such classism had contributed to her tragedy and how she went to do the same thing?
6. It could be hoped that after all the pain that Ann saw in her childhood that she would be compassionate and caring as an adult.  Why do you think she was surrounded by the same madness as an adult?
7. Ann is not an appealing person. She was not only a victim but she was also a perpetrator who was not nice.  Is this a natural outcome of damaged child growing into a damaged adult? 
8. Ann showed great compassion to really only one woman: her mother. When Maryon died in 1939, never having fully recovered from suicide attempt, Ann travelled east to mourn her. Do you think she recognized her parent for the hurting woman she had had become herself?
9. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis claimed they got their ideas of racial purity and separation of people because of ethnicity from the USA.  They were “inspired” by American segregation and eugenics and especially Paul Popenoe.  Why was he so easily able to reinvent himself after World War II?
10. By the end of the story, did you feel sympathy for Ann or not?

Summary by Clive

If a successful meeting can be gauged by the discussion it provokes, today was a successful meeting led by Carol and I.  It is ironic that it took place on Children’s Day in Taiwan, when the topic was about eugenics, a pseudoscience promulgated in the 19th and 20th centuries aiming to improve human genetics. It was used in the United States to justify the forced hospitalization and sterilization of tens of thousands of people based on race, class and perceived “feeblemindedness” and “moral delinquency,” and later by the Nazis to justify the murder of millions. Between 1907 and 1979, more than 64,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized by state and local governments. California sterilized at least 20,000 people, far more than any other state. Most, but not all, of those sterilized were poor; most were White. While the victims of eugenics were generally poor, that wasn’t always the case as we learned today.  It is rare for a discussion to be so lively that we couldn’t get to all the questions but that is what happened with the story of Ann Cooper Hewitt who was born into a wealthy and famous family.  Her upbringing, she later claimed, was miserable. Her mother would leave her alone for long stretches, and when she was around she was physically abusive. Her father, the engineer Peter Cooper Hewitt, died when she was a child, leaving her millions. But there was a catch: If Ann died childless, her portion of the fortune would go to her mother.

In 1934, when Ann was 20, her mother had her declared feebleminded, and she was sterilized without her consent or knowledge. She thought she had gotten an appendectomy until she overheard her nurses calling her their “idiot patient.”

She sued her mother and the two doctors who performed the operation — a public scandal that captured headlines across the country. Ultimately, she lost the case, because in California, where she lived, what happened to her was completely legal. Her story is recounted in the book we discussed today, “The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt,” by historian Audrey Clare Farley.  It is hard to believe it was non-fiction but it was such a joyous and lively discussion with Cathy, Emma, Florence, Mingli, Lily and Lydia. Even though Ann Cooper Hewitt was White, her sterilization, like the sterilization of thousands of other White women like her, was all about maintaining white supremacy. In the trial, Ann’s mother testified that she had caught her daughter having a friendly conversation with a Black man in their household staff. Even the hint of interracial romance supposedly proved she was unfit.

There were also plenty of blatantly racist cases which we couldn’t get to today. I had hoped to contrast the book today with another case that took place in Mississippi, where civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was surreptitiously sterilized by a White doctor while seeking treatment for a tumor in 1961.  Sterilization of Black women became so common it was often call a “Mississippi appendectomy.” Hamer only found out about her own sterilization when she “overheard the gossip on the plantation,” where she was a sharecropper, “spread by the wife of the plantation owner and relative of the doctor who performed the operation,” historian Keisha N. Blain, author of the upcoming “Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America,” So when did involuntary sterilization and commitment end?  Well, it didn’t. It is much rarer than it used to be, but “it’s still happening to disabled people, especially disabled people who are confined in some way, be it in an institution or a prison or jail.”  Between 2005 and 2013, California prison doctors coerced 144 female inmates to be sterilized, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting. The state passed a law in July to provide reparations for these women and the several hundred people sterilized during the eugenics era who are still living.  Thank you to everyone today and to Carol for being a passionate leader and participant.

Book Discussion for May 2, 2022 

We deeply appreciate Clive & Carol’s lead in the April book, it is really a good book to give us a reflection on womens sterilization in the early 19 century. Especially, Clive gives us the successive discussion report to give us one more review.

 Meeting Review April 4.docx

Mays Activity:

Book: The Spy & The Traitor

Author: Ben Macintyre

Leader: Mingli Chu

Time: 1:00. May 2, 2022

Place: Qubit Cafe (Hanshin Arena) No.6, Lane 50, Bo-Ai 3 Road, Zuo Ying District, Kaohsiung. Tel:07-3459477

高雄市左營區博愛三路50巷6號

We can start to have lunch before 1:00, between,  or after our discussion. We look forward to seeing you soon, please let me know if you are absent.