Carrie Derick (or Derrick) Canada’s first female full-time professor, a botanist, and a President of the Montreal Council of Women 1909-1912 and founder of the militant Suffrage Movement was, at least at one time, a proponent of ‘unnatural’ selection as promoted by the Eugenics Movement.
So, apparently, was Emily Murphy, a famous Canadian suffragist.
Now, how could a person who supported suffrage, in large part because women were seen as better suited to tackle the grave social problems of the city, support sterlizing the feeble-minded and the weak? I mean, that was the argument made by men to keep women down, that women were naturally feeble-minded and gentle-hearted and spiritually fine.
Before we judge, however, we must keep in mind that eugenics was a trendy belief among the educated in 1910. Theodore Roosevelt was a proponent as was Tommy Douglas, our Greatest Canadian, as well as Alexander Graham Bell, whose wife was deaf. So imagine!
In Derick’s case, well, in 1909 she presided over a lecture by a gentleman, a Professor Witmore, who was endeavoring to improve the lot of the feeble-minded (I’m just using their term)by understanding them and taking care of them, thereby promoting the “useful citizenship of the imbecile.”
Then in 1913, Derick gives a lecture in favour of sterilizing such people. Her argument seems ludicrous, it almost makes you laugh. She’s supposedly lecturing on genetics and the nature/nurture debate, something of interest to all who are concerned with ‘the improvement of the human race.” She gives two real life examples to illustrate her point: A man named Jukes, ‘a lazy drunken wastrel’ who is the first in a line of thousands of such degenerates. Then she names another man, who is respectable, hardworking and god-fearing, I presume, who begets a huge line of superior “clergymen, physicians, college professors (sic) distinguished army and navy officers and good, pure women (sic again).(No poets, though 
And, then, the political side of this eugenics issue rears its ugly and predictable head: “In the shipbuilding of Canada, unguarded immigration isone of the greatest dangers. Not only should the health and character of immigrants be known, but the record should also embrace his or her parents and grandparents and should a taint of degeneracy be disclosed, rejection should follow. Remember, Canada was experiencing a huge increase in immigration.
Well, I guess I’m not going to get to be alive: my Yorkshire ancestors were sheep-stealers. My French Canadian ancestors were Filles du Roy (prostitutes and otherwise imprisoned women sent to the New World as breeding stock.)And the Nicholsons, well, they are descended from Norseman, the mother of all pillagers and rapists.
And just yesterday, the news media was abuzz with the story that a spinal fluid test can prove conclusively if a person is going to get Alzheimer’s. As a fifty five year old who can’t remember anything and whose father died of Alzheimer’s I was a little freaked out to hear this. But I was especially concerned with the GIVEN that Alzheimer’s Disease was genetic. I mean heavy metals and other environmental issues must be behind the rise in Alzheimer’s disease. Or the numbers would be stable.
And my first thought was, yea, find out early and your husband leaves you and you get fired or at least not given tenure,(well no one gets tenure anymore) or your insurance stops covering you… EWWWW.
