Eugenics,Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe

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.