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Abstract:Twenty U.S. states permit the indefinite detention of civilly committed sex offenders after the end of their prison sentences if their dangerousness is due to a "mental abnormality." This article explores the origins of one such law by examining its predecessor, the Minnesota Psychopathic Personality Act of 1939. Passed in the wake of a panic over sex crimes and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1940, Minnesota's psychopath statute extended a 1917 eugenics law providing for the compulsory civil commitment and institutionalization of "defectives" to persons alleged to have a psychopathic personality. Analyzing the 1917 and 1939 laws together shows how one state's psychopath statute had less to do with psychiatric authority than with the legal and administrative framework established by Progressive-era eugenics. From the 1910s until today, dubious claims about the ability of science to identify potential criminals legitimized politically popular, but constitutionally questionable, forms of administrative and social control.

In popular discourse today, mothers are often set in opposition to political and evenhuman rights. Conservatives see women's "right to choose" as an assault on the fetus's human rights. Feminists, recalling the equality vs. difference debate, stress the incompatibilityof organizing for mothers' rights and advancing women's rights more broadly. Advocates of "mothers' rights," at least in the U.S. and Canada, usually focuson issues—such as breastfeeding, child custody, and worklife balance—associated more with the quality of life for the middle class than with conventional human rights.This article argues for a new political discourse calling for mothers' human rights. It first reflects on two pivotal moments when the debate over mothers' rights and entitlements entered the mainstream: the call for motherhood endowment around 1920, and the demand for welfare rights fifty years later. Since the failure of those movements, the circumstances facing U.S. mothers today has become so dire that we cannot afford not to talk about mothers' human rights.

This article uses the fifty‐year career of Paul Popenoe as a lens through which to examine the North American eugenics movement. Popenoe, a leading advocate of compulsory sterilisation in the 1930s, became a celebrated marriage counsellor in the 1950s, famous for the Ladies' Home Journal feature 'Can This Marriage Be Saved?' The ease with which Popenoe metamorphosed from a champion of sterilisation to an expert on marriage was made possible by, and helps to reveal, deep ideological affinities and organisational connections between eugenics and marriage counselling in the United States.