Are you feeble-minded?

This, my dears, is little Emma Woolverton. She was institutionalised in a home for the “feeble-minded”, when she was eight, for failing to learn to read or write in school. She was handy, cleanly, friendly, down to earth and practical. Visitors to her institution usually mistook her for staff, but she was actually an inmate. She came to spend over eighty years in institutions until she died of old age. She had several suitors who were willing to marry her and “take care” of her. (She was actually quite capable of taking care of herself, she was talented in woodwork, sewing, arts and crafts) But Emma was very special to the doctor. She was the centre piece in his Great Theory of heredity and feeble-mindedness. It had made him very famous and important to the kind of people, people like him care to be famous among. So the suitors were sent off, one after another, because Emma was forbidden to marry.

Emma was the unwitting heroine of a book, several papers and a series of pamphlets that the doctor wrote. She was quite famous too, but not under her real name. The doctor made her famous in her time under the name of Deborah Kalikakk.

These are Emma’s crimes.

She had failed to learn to read or write by the age of eight.

She was born into the wrong family.

Lots of people take longer than age eight to learn to read or write. Anyone who frequents one or more internet communities will know that lots of people in their twenties and thirties never bother to learn to spell properly.

Emma’s family, the Woolvertons, were already being studied by doctors because so many of them were either on benefits, prostitutes or criminal. It suited the time to think that criminality and feeble-mindedness were hereditary and the Woolvertons, or the Kallikakks, provided much needed ammunition for the idea of Eugenics.

Eugenics, very simply, is the idea that all men are created equal, but that some are less equal than others and since you can’t kill them you will have to stop them procreating. The idea was that there was such a thing as “bad blood”, and that it spread more easily than “good blood”. This made the Woolvertons so interesting, because there were two branches on the Woolverton tree, all descended from the same man: one was hard working, successful and prosperous – the other was addled with criminals, prostitutes and retards. The doctor came up with the name Kallikakk from the greek words for good and bad, since the family was half good, and half bad. The doctor thought that, basically, Martin Kallikakk – the founding father of the family, had “good” blood and that the reason for the Kallis prosperousness was the good blood provided by his lawful wife. Approvingly described as “a good quaker girl”. The Kakk-side was fallen from the loins of Martin’s unhappy dalliance with a “feeble-minded” bar wench, whose hereditary promiscuous ways soon made her the mother of a clan teeming with unwanted elements through that one son they had together. You could ask what the fuck Martin was doing fingering someone he wasn’t planning to take care of in the first place, but apparently the fact that his quaker-sprogs were well cared for and well nourished and his wench-foal was raised in misery and quite likely to have been exposed to large amounts of alcohol in the womb, has nothing to do with the price of fish.

Since people didn’t know anything about chromosomes or foetal alcohol syndrome, they thought that being an idiot was hereditary and when seemingly healthy families had feeble-minded children, it was put down to dormant inheritance.

There is a curse. It says: may you live in interesting times. Emma grew up in interesting times. Her society on the one hand recognized the need to care for people who couldn’t take care of themselves, but on the other hand would prefer not to.

When your morals tell you that you need to care for the unfortunate, but your wallet says that it’s costing you – that’s when you start to wish that there were no runts in the litter. Enter eugenics.

With Emma as poster child the doctor told the world how well the feeble-minded thrived under the right care. The right care meant doing as you are told, and not having children of your own. Emma’s clean scrubbed face and polite demeanour – sprung from the cackier side of the Kallikakks – was seen as proof of principle. The fact that Emma in all likelihood was not feeble minded obviously did not matter. The thought was that people like Emma would live out their life span in “dignity” and then fade away and become a historical parenthesis.

Above all, society was worried about the prolific procreation among the feeble minded. The toll they took on the communal assets was seen with worry. There was a general feeling that if unchecked the world would be run over by morons within two generations. With increased infant survival the assets had to stretch further. The increased survival mostly benefitted those classes who had previously had the most difficulty in keeping their children alive. Large litters of children were a badge of honour during the eighteenth century, but as survival increased the children of the impoverished classes increased the most, to the horror of the well off. At the same time, there was social pressure to be charitable and good, so any means and measures must be under the guise of charity.

By the time of his death, the doctor no longer believed in his own research and spoke out against eugenics. It was too late. Eugenics was the big thing. Loads of people were sterilized. Not only for failing IQ-tests, but also for “promiscuity”, and for meeting the doctor on the wrong day.

Aren’t we lucky to live in a time where we don’t look suspiciously at those who breed like rabbits and cost tax-money? Because I am sure you can’t think of any such people.

Dare to think: What could my life have been?

What the Butler Saw

As a young filly, growing up and all that, I had a collection of French Postcards -also known as "What the Butler Saw". I thought that I was immensely sophisticated and that they were post modern, funny and wonderfully camp. I proudly displayed them on the walls of my first flat, along with the Klimt-reproductions. I had them all in a nook in the flat that I painted in burgundy and furnished with a naff red velvet sofa, turn of the century dark, English coffee table and a fully functioning Russian samovar, from which I would serve tea to any guests.

Yes, I am afraid I was like that for quite some time. But, je ne regrette rien, as people are wont to say. What would our old age be if we couldn't tell hilarious stories of how pretentious we used to be? I called the nook, "My Imperial Russian Bordello Corner" and was quite proud of it. I was not yet clever enough to realize why male callers always seemed to get the wrong idea ...

As I grew older, I started to see the cards in a different light. Many of the girls were obviously not very old. Many of them looked poorly fed. And then it struck me: yes, they were all dead now. Hopefully of old age. But at that moment, when they were frozen in time by silver nitrate, they were probably worried about where their next meal would come from, likely a bit humiliated and definitely paid a pittance for their trouble.

That epiphany made me think that there is more than one direction from where to approach a problem, a phenomenon or a riddle. I started turning things over in my head. I ask these questions every day: "Whom will it benefit?", "Whom will it hurt?", "Who will have to clean up afterwards?" and "Whose voice is missing from the choir?".

Young exploited women, are young exploited women whether they are born in Victorian times or Thatcherian times.

And don't give me Jordan and Jodie. For every Jordan and Jodie, there are tens of thousands of girls who are paid a pittance, who are humiliated by people telling them to lose weight or buy boobs or go blond and who wonder where their next meal will come from and if they will feel comfortable eating it.

I am generally a cowardly thing. I can't say I have made much difference. I do feel, however, that we owe it, whether we dare to act or not, to see all the people and not pretend that some never existed. I have been Whatthebutlersaw since 2001, I think it is a good name for a beholder.


































Dare to think: How old am I?