Elizabeth Burton was recently awarded the Kentucky Foundation for Women Artist Enrichment Grant, which will help her conduct research for her novel, focused on the eugenics movement in the 1950s in Appalachia.
Hopkinsville Community College instructor Elizabeth Burton is one of 44 recipients of grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women this year. The foundation awards grants to feminist artists and organizations who work to create positive social changes throughout Kentucky. Burton was awarded the $1,000 grant to continue research for her novel, which explores how eugenics was used in various parts of Appalachia as a method of population control. Through her research and writing, Burton learned that her own family history had been affected by eugenics.
It wasn't until around six years ago that Burton first learned about eugenics. Eugenics is the study of controlling population growth through a number of methods meant to discourage reproduction among populations with traits deemed as undesirable. In practice, eugenics in the 20th century often meant involuntary sterilization, often without the knowledge of the man or woman being sterilized. A tool of oppression and discrimination, many states used eugenics to justify the abuse of entire groups of people. Framed as a way of suppressing populations that were deemed intellectually or morally inferior, the practice frequently targeted racial and ethnic minority groups as well as the poor. Eugenics was employed by states from the time of World War II through the Civil Rights Era.
For Burton, the realization that eugenics was used in the area she grew up in hit home. And as she embarked on her research, she found that her maternal grandmother was a victim of a eugenics doctor. As she recently shared with Kentucky New Era in a recent article, "He thought my grandparents had too many children. They had two children and they were poor eastern Kentucky school teachers. He tried to give my grandmother a drug to abort my mother without telling my grandmother she was pregnant." Burton went on to say that her grandmother took only one dose of the drug, and gave birth to the child (Burton's mother) but that the drug caused significant health issues that stayed with her mother for her entire life.
The novel is a fictionalized account of a 14 year old girl, deemed incorrectly by government officials to be promiscuous, and therefore a candidate for eugenics. The girl is forcibly sterilized via tubal ligation. The tale then follows the protagonist through the years following her sterilization in which she is rejected by her fiance. After which she sells her engagement ring and tries to put her life back together in Hopkinsville. The book is in the editing stage now, and Burton plans to make it the first of three novels in a series.
Burton points out that it is important to shine a light on the practice of eugenics, not only to understand the past but because there are reports that it is still occurring in the United States today. In September of 2020, news stories began to surface of women at an immigrant detention center in Georgia being forced or coerced into sterilization. As Burton states, "The idea that some people have better genes than others, that some people are just born better than others, those are very much eugenics ideas. When those things are coming out again, it shows me that eugenics never went away." She goes on to say, "I want to let people know what actually happened in history. Secondly, I want to make sure that people at least have a seed in their consciousness to be able to recognize these ideas in present day society — and reject them."