“Illustrative Cases of Hereditary Degeneracy”: The Use of Family Studies to Support New Zealand’s Eugenic Narrative in the 1920s

Abstract: How were family studies used to localize and justify the eugenic argument in a far corner of the British Empire? This paper, based on the study of six New Zealand families given as examples of hereditary degeneracy in a 1925 government report, argues that the transmission of eugenic ideas allowed dominant American examples to be used to address concerns about the costs of feeblemindedness far beyond their original context. The flawed methodologies employed in the American studies were likewise replicated without critique. Reexamination finds the example families were both more complex and less defective than their representations.