The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt by Audrey Clare Farley
What's It About?
"The Unfit Heiress" chronicles the fight for inheritance between Ann Cooper Hewitt and her socialite mother Maryon, who had her daughter sterilized without her knowledge. A sensational court case ensued, and powerful eugenicists saw an opportunity to restrict reproductive rights in America for decades to come.Twentieth-century America brimmed with stories about poor little rich girls: young women born into great wealth yet afflicted with miserable childhoods and marriages. Tales of unhappy heiresses stirred the public’s voyeurism and sense of smugness. Just imagine — all the money in the world can’t make up for life’s disappointments! It is a story that never gets old.
The drama of the American heiress went back to the Gilded Age when many an ambitious debutante sailed to Europe in search of a titled husband. Some fled dictatorial fathers and hypercritical mothers. Ironically, these young women socialites who hoped to break free of lingering Victorian strictures often became enmeshed in the same stifling conventions abroad. The novelist Edith Wharton, who depicted the plight of privileged white women in high society, counted among the few who got out from under and created her own life.
By the time that the heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt was born in Paris on June 28, 1914 — auspiciously, on the first day of World War I, as her mother never failed to remind her — change was in the air as women on both sides of the Atlantic crusaded for suffrage and independence.
Yet in The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Hooper Hewitt (Grand Central Publishing), historian Audrey Clare Farley unravels a story of intimidation, cruelty, and sexism that challenges the very idea of the modern woman. A work of creative nonfiction, The Unfit Heiress places its heroine in the crosshairs of reactionary social and cultural trends.
A Dark Childhood and the Fight for Inheritance
Ann Cooper Hewitt’s lawsuit against her mother, Maryon Andrews Bruguière Deming Cooper Hewitt d ’Erlanger McCarter, filled the newspapers during the mid-1930s but is largely unknown today. Ann’s father, Peter Cooper Hewitt, the patrician inventor of the mercury-vapor lamp, died in 1921 leaving an estate worth over $4 million. His will stipulated that Ann would inherit two-thirds of the estate and Maryon one-third. However, if Ann were to die childless, her share would revert to Maryon.
It does not appear that anyone ever said a nice word about Maryon. Abusive, ruthless, manipulative, greedy, litigious, opportunistic, and conniving, Maryon arrived in New York City in 1903, “a temptress from rural Alabama,” and set her cap for the wealthiest men in town, married and single. “Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan had speculated on real estate; Maryon speculated on men,” Farley notes dryly.
In light of Peter Cooper Hewitt’s proviso, Maryon set forth to guarantee that Ann would never bear children. She laid the groundwork during her daughter’s earliest years. Even when Ann was a child, Maryon described her as misbehaved, impulsive, and obsessed with sex: “defects” caused by a premature birth, she said.
No one challenged the accusations while Maryon cut, hit, burned, and institutionalized her daughter. As Ann grew up, Maryon insisted that her daughter was degenerate and “feebleminded,” a catch-all phrase for women and men who were said to pose a genetic risk to society.
Maryon was backed by the so-called science of eugenics in the summer of 1934 when Ann, presumably hospitalized for an appendectomy, ended up undergoing a salpingectomy as well.
The involuntary sterilization surgery had been requested by Maryon and approved by two physicians and a psychologist who tested Ann’s intelligence and determined she was an imbecile. This finding allowed sterilization to proceed without the patient’s permission.
Dangerous Ideology of Eugenics and Its Role in Women’s Lives
The term eugenics, which means wellborn, was coined in 1883 and gained a foothold in the United States in the early twentieth century. President Theodore Roosevelt, concerned about “race suicide,” became a proponent. Eugenics gained support from academics and reformers who believed criminality, poverty, idiocy, and other “bad traits” could be eliminated if unfit parents were prevented from reproducing. Although the movement began to lose momentum when the Nazis embraced it, countless forced sterilizations continued to be performed well into the 1970s. Black and destitute women often were victims.
In 1936, when Ann Cooper Hewitt sued her mother for enabling the salpingectomy, the trial outcome was likely to favor Maryon. Nine years earlier, the Supreme Court had upheld the legitimacy of compulsory sterilization with the Buck v. Bell decision. But Maryon, who attempted suicide and fought extradition to California in order to stall the proceedings, ended up benefiting undeservedly from Ann’s compassion.
After dropping the suit, Ann hoped for a reconciliation with her mother. That never occurred and Maryon died a few years later. Like her mother, Ann married five times and found happiness elusive.
The Unfit Heiress has much to teach us about the dangerous ideology of eugenics and how it destroyed women’s lives. As a cultural historian, Farley offers a cautionary tale about pseudo-science and medical authority and sees the legacy of eugenics in the Cold War ideal of the American family and ambivalence about female sexuality.
The book is entertaining and engrossing, as Farley marvelously evokes the scandals that swirled around Maryon and Ann. Readers will feel they are right in the thick of it!
About Audrey Clare Farley:
Audrey Clare Farley is a scholar of twentieth-century American culture with special interests in science and religion. She earned a PhD in English literature at University of Maryland, College Park. She now teaches U.S. history at Mount St. Mary’s University and history writing for Catapult.
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 debate of eugenics.
Her forthcoming Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America explores the lives of the four women behind NIMH’s famous case study of schizophrenia. It will be published by Grand Central in June 2023.
Audrey’s essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Washington Post and many other outlets. She lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania.
