An Interesting Specimen For Research - Betty Lambert - Jennie's Story

                     Jennie's Story

Set in the late 1930's on the Canadian prairies. It concerns the Sexual Sterilization Act that was enacted in 1928, allowing a sterilization procedure to be performed without consent on individuals that were.

deemed to be unfit or mentally challenged. Jennie McGrane
takes the title role, and her discovery of what the priest Father
Fabrizeau has done to her is the central drama of the play. Believing she had an appendectomy when she was a teenager, the truth is revealed when she's unable to conceive.

This was one of Lambert's latter works, and among her finest.
In 1999, it was adapted into an independent film by Kim
Hogan.
Winner of the 1983 Chalmers Canadian Play Award.

Looking for a play to post yesterday, I came across this play supposedly about the infamous Canadian eugenics movement, especially the most infamous part of it in Alberta. I read the description of the play and was immediately skeptical about it because in the decades in question, the 1920s and 30s, perhaps the most prominent organization opposed to eugenic sterilization, in fact all sterilizations was the Catholic Church.  That was certainly true in the United States in Canada and in Britain.  Having so recently critisized the Pius Popes, I have to, in full justice, point out that it was Pius XI's 1930 encyclical Casti Conubii that condemned sterilization.*  If the "Father Fabrizeau" of the story took part in a highly doubtful sterilization of a young girl he was having sex with, he was certainly doing something he knew the Pope had condemned as a grave sin.  It's an odd choice for a playwright to make, if she had known much about the actual eugenics establishment in Alberta which, from my reading, is almost an entirely Anglo-Saxon one.  I don't know what kind of religion the members of the Eugenics Boards professed, if any, but I doubt any of them were Catholics in good standing and I especially doubt they would have been French Canadian Catholics.  I never met a French Catholic Priest of that time who wasn't deeply Integralist, though here just about all of them were the product of an infamously Jansenist seminary in Quebec.

Betty Lambert, unfortunately, died young from lung cancer in 1983 so she's not around to attest to the alleged historicity of her play, she claimed it was based on a story her mother had told her about the wife of a farmer she knew. 
 
"This story my mother told me (now she tells me it's not the whole story--she's so angry at me for having written it). I grew up on this story about a woman, a girl really, who had worked for the local priest in southern Alberta. On the advice of the priest, she went to Calgary for an operation, thinking that she was having an appendectomy. Years later she married a farmer in the district, and they were very much in love, but she couldn't seem to get pregnant. Finally she went back to the city to find out why she couldn't get pregnant, and she was told that she had had a hysterectomy, at which point she went home and opened a bottle of Armstrong and Hammer lye and mixed it up with some water and drank it. And killed herself.

"That is a story that I had been told since I was a girl, and I knew the husband, so that when I came to write...I mean, it's always bothered me, it's something I knew I'd have to deal with one day. I mean the whole...the Catholic Church. She was obviously sleeping with the priest, and I couldn't figure it out. I thought he would have to have had some kind of legal support to do a thing like that, so I started looking into the statutes on sterlization and they're horrific. B.C. was bad, but Alberta was unbelievable. In Alberta you could be sterilized--and by that they meant hysterectomy--for the transmission of evil, and evil was loosely defined as anything from pauperism to alcoholism, to feeble-mindedness. The figures are incredible, and this was not changed until 1971."
-from an interview with Betty Lambert

I would love to know if anything like this ever happened that way, I have no way to know how you would find out if that was the case.  How the actions of such a son-of-a-bitch priest would match the official procedures of the Alberta Eugenics Board might be enlightening, as would any evidence that there were irregular sterilizations of the type presented in the play.  

If something like that happened, I don't know but I'm highly doubtful.  I'm especially doubtful because Betty Lambert admitted that her own mother, from whom she claimed to get the story, said it was not "the whole story" and that she was "angry at [her daughter] for having written it].   What it sounds like to me was the typical WASP slander of the Catholic priesthood that has been done in fiction and in hack theater since the dawn of the English language theater.   You have to wonder what the people who told and repeated the story that Lambert made of the rampant and racist use of eugenic sterilization, involuntary sterilizations and people duped into being sterilized by medical professionals.  Why was it this one story out of so many which were and could be documented that caught on in this particular theatrical telling of it?  An award winning one, no less. 

I do recognize in this the automatic-anti-Catholicism that was perhaps the mainstream dialect of the kind of writer that Lambert consciously chose to be.  The Deputy that I wrote about the other day is just one of scores and hundreds of such themed works of the period and which is certainly not dead, not even in declining viability.   If only historical accuracy were as stressed in such an intelligentsia. 

If she had wanted to choose religious figures of the time who supported the eugenics movements, she could have chosen one of the many, named, public, supporters of eugenics and who even participated in the administration of eugenics.* 

What can be known is that a priest who did that in the late 1930s would have known what he did was triply a violation of the official law of the Catholic Church, he broke his vow of chastity, he had extramarital sex and he duped the girl he was raping into being sterilized. 

*  70  Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason.  Pius XI  Casti Connubii

I am rather shocked to realize that this is in line with my argument that there is no overriding governmental interest or right that is superior to the right of a woman to control her own body, which is the basis of my opposition to the anti-choice arguments.  I am sure that Pius XI would cite there being another person involved in the case of abortion, though I would still hold that the state has no right to tell a woman that she must be pregnant any more than it could tell her that she must become pregnant or that, once pregnant it had the right to force her to terminate her pregnancy.   Though I'm sure that wouldn't be an argument that Catholics who oppose a right of choice in that matter would accept.  We are entirely in agreement that the state has no right to sterilize a woman involuntarily.   

Though I have to wonder that in the cases of profound retardation in which women don't understand enough to know what pregnancy is or the consequences of having sex you can meaningfully talk about it being a matter of personal choice.  I've known one such case and was troubled about it from when the elderly grandmother who was the caretaker of her profoundly retarded granddaughter was alive, now that she's dead, I have no idea what has happened to the woman.  I would never leave that decision in the hands of an appointed board, such as was common in the past,  I wouldn't trust anyone except a judge to make such a decision and I probably wouldn't trust a lot of them to do it.  I certainly wouldn't have trusted the majority of the Supreme Court in 1926 who so appallingly and cavalierly disposed of the rights of Carrie Buck (who was not mentally deficient, at all) or her daughter whose death was likely a result of that infamous case. 

** You might find this interview from Interfaith Voices interesting.  

 This week on "Interfaith Voices," we are airing an interview that deals with a topic from Catholic life I had never heard of before: the Catholic struggle against the eugenics movement in the first half of the 20th century. It is a conversation with Sharon Leon, author of a new book, An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics.

Or you could search my archives, I've written a lot about eugenics and who supported it and who opposed it.