From researcher/writer Molly A. Badgett
There's so much
we didn't know.
Since the end of World War II, the story we’ve heard about the Baby Boom is that it was a result of returning soldiers and a thriving economy. It was a time for families.
When Betty Friedan broke women’s domestic trance in 1963 with the release of The Feminine Mystique, millions of readers cheered her effort to identify culprits behind “the problem that has no name” — those who narrowed women’s role within those same families.
But both of these narratives have been stunningly incomplete. This book will reveal the glaringly overlooked truths behind the birth of more than 76 million babies and the reason why their families — particularly Mother — seemed oddly flawless.
Deception Stories: A Blog
Quite an Impression!
Until the first couple of decades of the 20th century, people believed babies were physically affected by a mother’s experiences or emotions. The belief in maternal impressions was also called pre-natal culture or “marking,” and it annoyed eugenicists.
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Really Bad ‘Science’
Eugenics wasn’t the only theory that proved to be deadly. In the Soviet Union, faith in the Lamarckian theory of heredity, while it had been denounced elsewhere, created decades of famine in the mid-20th century. Turns out, crops don’t simply acquire characteristics
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Eugenics in the Gym
In many eugenicists’ minds, being strong and healthy was a matter of national pride and a reflection of good genes, especially if you were male. Read about the influence eugenics had on physical education, including your own high-school phys-ed class.
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Journalist Molly Badgett has spent nearly two decades researching people and events from the 1880s to the 1980s, uncovering remarkable webs of collaboration along a single theme that molded the lives of millions of American men, women, and children. Her findings — largely overlooked by scholars — raise two important questions: “How did we not already know this?” and “Could it happen again?”
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