Audrey Clare Farley's "The Unfit Heiress"

Audrey Clare Farley is a historian of twentieth-century American fiction and culture with special interests in science and religion. Prior to writing full-time, she taught literature at University of Maryland, College Park, where she earned a PhD in English.

Her first book, The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt, tells the story of a 1930s millionairess whose mother secretly sterilized her to deprive her of the family fortune, sparking a sensational case and forcing a public debate of eugenics.

Farley applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Unfit Heiress and reported the following:

From page 99:

Maryon admitted that she gambled, but insisted that she had never used Ann’s money for it.

It was during this time, Maryon had asserted, that Ann’s sex addiction was made known, as she was found sleeping in bed with a boy of the same age at an institution. This occurred a few years after Maryon had caught Ann masturbating as a toddler. The first incident, Maryon had excused. She didn’t want to believe her daughter’s ways. But the second revealed to her that her daughter was absolutely deranged.

To further demonstrate that Ann was feebleminded, despite her best efforts, Mrs. Cooper Hewitt claimed that Ann had refused to be educated, misbehaving at one institution after another in order to be expelled. “Ann has never cared for anyone who could teach her or help her get along in life,” she told a newspaper. Maryon also cited the intelligence test performed by the state psychologist shortly before the procedure. According to Scally’s notes, Ann had poorly responded to the questions about American history. As a result, she’d been classified as a “high grade moron.” Mrs. Cooper Hewitt noted that the two doctors agreed with this assessment, as they’d already publicly stated.

Maryon didn’t know it, but with the label of “moron,” Ann had actually tested higher than two other clinical categories: idiot and imbecile. According to the state-sanctioned intelligence test that she’d been given (the Stanford-Binet test), the heiress had a mental age of eleven. The state applied the term imbecile to those with a mental age between two and seven, and idiot to those with one under two years. These clinical categories had been supplied by psychologist Henry Goddard, whose intelligence rubric (little more than a civics test, privileging those with knowledge of American his­tory) provided the basis for the Stanford-Binet, created by Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman and used to diagnosis Carrie Buck.

Page 99 perfectly captures my book. It combines sensational storytelling with historical research. It gives readers a glimpse of the mother-daughter feud that propels the narrative. And it explores one of the book’s primary themes: how female sexuality has been pathologized, subjecting women—even white heiresses—to extraordinary state violence.

At this particular moment in the story, socialite Maryon Cooper Hewitt has just attempted suicide. She’s in a New Jersey hospital, having fled California after criminal mayhem charges were filed against her there for having two doctors sterilize her daughter without her knowledge—all to cheat Ann out of her father’s estate. The news of the case has riveted the public, and Americans are eager to hear what Maryon has to stay for herself.

Maryon’s defense: Ann has “erotic tendencies,” and she failed an intelligence test administered by a state psychologist. As becomes clear throughout the book, sexuality and imbecility were thought to be one and the same. Sexually deviant women were assumed to be intellectually disabled, and intellectually disabled people were assumed to be sexually deviant. This was just one of the many junk scientific notions of the eugenics movement in America.

But why were sexual deviance and "feeblemindedness" perceived to be so dangerous to society that forcible sterilization provided the only solution? Why would two doctors operate upon Ann because of her personal life and supposed mental defects, but not upon women with, say, diabetes? In large part, because sexual deviance and feeblemindedness were thought to more seriously threaten the purity of the white race. Feebleminded women were prone to cross the color line. (And in fact, Maryon would go on to make much of the fact that Ann once flirted with a “Negro” train porter.) At a time when Americans feared the rising number of immigrants and African Americans beyond the rural South, this simply could not be tolerated.

Visit Audrey Clare Farley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue