Eugenics Case Study

1683 Words4 Pages

Megan Matichak
5/15/2014
Final Take Home Exam
Short Answer:
1. Charity Girls- Charity girls is a degrading term for working class women who practiced treating. This is the idea that women traded sexual favors for gifts and nice dinners without accepting cash in return. This emerges in the late 19th, early 20th century due to the rise of leisure activities and cheap amusements. Working class women still made less money but wanted to be social and have fun, so this option allowed them the freedom to do so. It is important because it did not initially start out as a sexual exchange, but eventually evolved into that. It was bordering on the line of prostitution, and society basically pegged these women as desperate, charity cases. Today, it looks more like what we would call an escort service.
2. Eugenics- Eugenics is a term coined by Francis Galton in 1883 and it is the belief and practice of improving the genetic quality of the human population. This idea that one could trace hereditary problems and find solutions for them gained significant ground in addressing certain societal issues such as poor people and welfare. Two types of eugenics emerged, positive and negative, but the U.S., negative eugenics was preferred. This is the idea of destroying defectives and degenerates from the population to promote and preserve the fittest, a very social Darwinist idea. This is important to sexuality because many homosexuals were sterilized, thus creating the stigma that homosexuality was a disease that could be cured.
3. The Lavender Scare- A movement in the 1950’s to get rid of all the gays in the government because they were susceptible to blackmail. During this period, gays would fight back against city last and the police force by ...

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...safe place ended in refugee camps for homosexuals. One popular safe camp for them was located in San Francisco. Carl Whittman speaks about his experience of being in an unsafe environment and moving to a camp in San Francisco to escape.
Furthermore, the government refused to fund or support the gay rights community. With AIDS becoming a major issue, the gay community needed help financially from the government and was not given the help. Although there was no way to stop AIDS, there could have been ways through research that they would have been able to prevent it from spreading. This affected the community negatively and shows how against the gay community the government was. In all, the Gay Rights Movement throughout the 20th century went through struggles to be accepted and were negatively affected because of the way the government handled certain situations.

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