Policies regulating marital unions have a very long history, whether promoted by religious groups or perpetuated through class or caste systems of arranged marriages or enforced endogamy. In some parts of the world, marriages were forbidden between individuals based on their racial or ethnic identity, or on being classified as a person with an intellectual disability. For example, in the United States, anti-miscegenation laws date back to the 17th-century, and in much of Latin America, marriages across castes were regulated and classified according to an elaborate system depicted in the “casta paintings.” Thus, laws regulating marriage predate the eugenics movement, but were emboldened and expanded by hereditary theories of disease, difference, and difference.

Eugenics moved marriage policies in two general directions. The first was reinforced and widened restrictions on interracial marriages as well as prohibitions that banned people with intellectual disabilities (usually based on I.Q. scores) from marrying. In the United States, the former culminated in the 1924 passage of the Racial Integrity Act, which mandated the strict enforcement of interracial unions, and was the basis for the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia in which anti-miscegenation laws ultimately were found unconstitutional. Common as well were prenuptial certificates which were inconsistently implemented but on the books in countries ranging from Argentina to Japan.

Less well known but just as common (over 30 U.S. states had such laws on the books) were statutes controlling the unions of people with disabilities. In Canada, the 1896 Ontario Statutes imposed a $500 penalty on anyone issuing a marriage license to any person deemed “insane” or “idiotic”; in 1911, as the eugenics movements grew, a prison sentence of up to 12 months was added. Even though Canada was not at the forefront of passing explicitly eugenic marital laws, tightening stipulations around sexual immortality and adultery, as well as the racially motivated passage of the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act, introduced values of sexual purity, racial segregation, and reproductive control into Canada’s approach to marital unions.

Seen in this framework, prohibitions against same-sex marriage are a continuation of the kinds of reproductive control characteristic of the eugenic movement.

In addition to advocating marriage restrictions, eugenicists were often at the forefront of marriage counseling, usually by encouraging adherence to strict gender roles in which women’s principal roles ere viewed as that of breeders and mothers. Such ideas resonated powerfully in Weimar and Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and New Zealand during the first half of the 20th century.

In the United States in the 1930s, prominent eugenicist Paul Popenoe turned his attention from sterilization advocacy to marriage counseling. He opened the American Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles where he counseled tens of thousands of couples and encouraged women to submit to their husbands in order to overcome sexual frigidity. This was also the case with José Chelala Aguilera who promoted similar ideas of marital sexuality in pre-Castro Cuba, disseminating his eugenic and gendered message via radio, newspapers, and other popular media.

Marriage counseling, replete with advice about proper mating practices, was common among eugenicists and eugenically oriented psychologists in the 20th century. More recently, some on-line dating services, which seemingly are driven by individual choice and self-presentation, have incorporated kinds of psychometric instruments to assess personality and compatibility developed by eugenicist early in the 20th century.

-Alexandra Minna Stern

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• Davis, R.L. (2010). More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Martial Bliss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

• McLaren, A. (1990). Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945. New York: McClelland and Stewart.

• Pascoe, P. (2010). What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of America. New York: Oxford University Press.

• Snell, J.G. (1983). 'The White Life for Two': The Defence of Marriage and Sexual Morality in Canada, 1890-1914. Historie Sociale-Social History, XVI(31), 111-128.

• Wanhalla, A. (2007). To 'Better the Breed of Men': women and eugenics in New Zealand, 1900-1935. Women's History Review, 16(2), 163-183.

• Stern, A.M. (2005). Eugenic Nations: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Berkeley: University of California Press.