The Curious Case of the Socialite Who Sterilized Her Daughter

Did Maryon Cooper Hewitt want to suppress “bad genes” or steal her child’s inheritance? Their battle over genetics and motherhood riveted the nation in 1936.

Collage by Yunuen Bonaparte | Story edited by Lynne Peskoe-Yang

Bulbs flashed as the rouge- and fur-wearing socialite took the stand in a trial that would rivet the American public for the next several months. The image of the solemn-faced 22-year-old would appear in newspapers across the country. Some, like The New York Times, would print nearly 50 stories detailing the woman’s private life — her childhood, romantic relationships, drinking and spending habits, even the lingerie she was wearing. (It was imported from France.) It was January of 1936, and heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt was suing her mother in a San Francisco court for $500,000 (roughly $9 million today). The plaintiff claimed that her mother paid doctors to “unsex” her during an appendectomy in order to deprive her of an inheritance from her millionaire father’s estate. The defendant argued that she was merely protecting her daughter — and society — from the consequences of Ann becoming pregnant.

When Peter Cooper Hewitt died in 1921, the inventor and entrepreneur left two-thirds of his estate to Ann and one-third to Ann’s mother, his wife. But the will stipulated that Ann’s share reverted back to her mother if Ann died childless. Knowing this, Ann’s mother purportedly paid two doctors $9,000 each (about $165,000 today) to remove her daughter’s fallopian tubes along with her appendix when Ann presented at the hospital with stomach pains. This occurred merely months before the plaintiff’s 21st birthday, after which point Ann’s mother would have no further say in her medical care because Ann would no longer be a minor.

Ann Cooper Hewitt being sworn in to testify before municipal judge Sylvain J. Lazarus. (Photo courtesy AP Photo/RJF)

Ann’s mother insisted that she took this action because Ann was “feebleminded,” citing an intelligence test performed by a psychologist shortly before the procedure. A History Magazine story on the case by G.S. Payne reported that Ann could not answer questions such as “How long is the longest river in the United States?” and “What is the term of a U.S. president?” The defendant further claimed that her daughter was morally degenerate, referencing Ann’s addiction to masturbation, love letters between Ann and her chauffeur that contained the young lady’s pubic hairs, and Ann’s “erotic tendencies” with men ranging from bellhops to “Negro” train porters.

In response to these accusations, the plaintiff’s attorney swiftly called witnesses who could speak to Ann’s intelligence. “She writes fluently in French and can converse in Italian,” a physician affirmed via affidavit. “She has read books on Shakespeare, French history, Napoleon Bonaparte, Marie Antoinette, King Lear, Dante’s Inferno, and the works of Charles Dickens.” If there were any intellectual deficiencies, this witness wrote, they were due to Ann having been neglected by her mother for most of her childhood.

The young socialite developed this narrative on the stand. “I was locked up all the time,” Ann testified. “She never had any affection for me whatsoever. She would drink all night and drag me out at four in the morning to tell me if I’d die, she’d have all my money.” A nurse who cared for Ann after the operation corroborated her story, explaining that she’d been hired to look after a mental case but formed an entirely different opinion about the situation: “Half an hour after I saw the girl for the first time, I knew that here was no insane person. I observed three months of abuse of her by her mother. She was kept in pajamas upstairs. Her letters were censored. So were her telephone calls.” Ann’s attorney made a point to emphasize that Ann’s mother, Maryon Cooper Hewitt, known in Europe as the “greatest woman gambler in the world,” was a four-time divorcée. In court and when speaking with reporters, he referred to her by all of her married names: Mrs. Maryon Brugiere-Denning-Hewitt-d’Erlanger-McCarter. (Peter Cooper Hewitt, Maryon’s third spouse, was the only one she did not divorce, so she resumed her deceased husband’s name after her final marriage.)

Ann Cooper Hewitt, left, with her nurse, Anne Lindsay, in the court where she testified about the sterilization operation that was performed on her, January 23, 1936. (Photo courtesy AP Photo/RJF)

As the spotlight moved from Ann’s “adrift” ways to her mother’s, it became clear to the public that both women were on trial for the same offense: being unqualified for motherhood. Wendy Kline, who wrote a chapter on the case in her book, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom, explains that the public found nothing extraordinary about this focus, as 1930s society fixated on the ills of female sexuality and the importance of protecting maternal virtues during a time of social crisis. For Depression-era America, Kline writes, “the real problem was not financial but feminine.”

There was something else about this case that raised eyebrows: the unconventional use of sterilization. Ann appeared to have been sterilized because of environmental rather than genetic defects; she was the product of bad parenting, rather than bad genes. Furthermore, the involuntary procedure occurred in a private practice, rather than in an institutional setting. Ann was also wealthy, whereas the usual targets of sterilization (epileptic, intellectually disabled, and unemployed persons) were poor. If the court ruled in favor of Ann’s mother, these details could reinvigorate and redefine a flailing movement that embraced the practice of sterilization: eugenics.

The term “eugenics,” which translates to “well-born” from Greek, originated with English intellectual Sir Francis Galton. In his 1869 book Hereditary Genius, Galton drew on Gregor Mendel’s insights on the reproductive patterns of peas to advocate a selective breeding program among humans. Galton wanted to ensure that the characteristics he associated with the upper classes, such as superior intelligence, were passed down. Galton’s theories significantly shaped policies in the United States, as Edwin Black’s volume, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, demonstrates. According to Black, the Englishman’s ideas inspired Charles Davenport, a prominent American biologist, to establish the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York in 1910. Davenport appointed Harry Laughlin as the first director, and the two hired field workers to collect family pedigrees from the public. These workers were especially eager to identify “defective” traits, such as poverty, intellectual disability, and criminality. With the support of philanthropic organizations, such as the Carnegie Institution, and certain government offices, such as the Department of Agriculture, the ERO campaigned for stringent immigration restrictions and helped to pass legislation in 28 states authorizing the sterilization of persons deemed to be “unfit.” Over 64,000 individuals went under the knife as a result of these laws.

An anti-forced sterilization poster by the artist Rachael Romero, 1953. (Photo courtesy Library of Congress)

One of them was Carrie Buck, an impoverished woman in rural Virginia who conceived a baby out of wedlock. Authorities used this fact to claim that she, like her mother, was promiscuous. (Buck claimed to have been raped.) After Buck was sent to an epileptic colony and sterilized against her will, a lawyer representing Buck sued the medical authorities acting on behalf of the state. (He was collaborating with the defense to test the legality of the new legislation.) In 1927, the case, Buck v. Bell, went all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the ruling of the Virginia courts. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously opined, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind …. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

But by the time Ann Cooper Hewitt’s trial commenced in 1936, the “science” behind eugenics was proving to be rather shoddy. In her chapter on the case, Kline explains that both genetic researchers and biologists were beginning to realize that the inheritance of positive or negative traits extended well beyond one generation. A prominent biologist at Johns Hopkins noted that even if all of the “feebleminded” persons in the country were sterilized, it could take 68 generations to decrease the proportion of those traits in the population. This was because “normal” people could be carriers of the trait. Colleagues elaborated on this criticism, claiming that it was impossible to identify potential carriers of “bad genes” and that eugenicists completely disregarded the role of the environment in the development of traits.

The rise of the Nazi party in Europe delivered another blow to the eugenics movement. In 1933, under the new leadership of Adolf Hitler, the Nazis implemented a eugenic sterilization program that impacted more than 350,000 individuals. At first, leading eugenicists in the United States were thrilled to see what the Nazis had accomplished using their own programs as blueprints. Some, like Joseph DeJarnette of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, were even a little envious to observe, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.” But eugenicists soon realized that Hitler’s persecution of the Jews could seriously undermine support for sterilization in the United States. While the full horror of Hitler’s plans had not been made known to the world, the dictator had already become extremely unpopular among Americans. For the first time, eugenicists second-guessed their rhetoric of “racial integrity” and “race betterment,” thinking it better to find a new idiom with which to describe the noble work of the movement. The Cooper Hewitt case provided that idiom.

In February of 1936, an ambulance was called to the Plaza Hotel in New York City, where a guest registered under the name “Mrs. Jane Merritt” was found unconscious.