ABSTRACT
Josephine Shaw Lowell (1843-1905) was the first female member of New York’s State Board of Charities, the body charged with supervising its public welfare institutions, and one of the leading social reformers of the late nineteenth century. At the time Lowell joined the Board, in 1876, pauperism, meaning chronic poverty, was being redefined as an inherited disability. Partly due to research such as that which Lowell describes in this report, and partly due to the heredity charts in Richard Dugdale’s “The Jukes” (Chapter 20), it seemed impossible to deny the truth of the degenerationists’ contention that disabilities were not only hereditary, but also interchangeable, so that, for instance, poor women might bear criminal children. “Hard” hereditarianism replaced the softer determinism of earlier degeneration theory, while pessimism supplanted the earlier optimism about human perfectibility that can be see in works by Benjamin Rush and phrenologists. Lowell and others began to promote eugenic solutions even though it would be years before Galton coined the specific term eugenics (Chapter 45).
