Throughout the 20th century, the eugenics movement dominated medical debates in Connecticut. Eugenics is a discredited study of genetics to identify desirable and undesirable traits. From deportations, institutionalizations, sterilizations, and even proposed executions of people with mental illness, eugenic policies took hold in American life. Teacher, historian, and New Haven Museum educator Eve Galanis will present a lunchtime webinar, “The Eugenics Movement in Connecticut: Psychology and Community Resistance,” on August 27, 2025, at 12:30 pm.
The presentation will be based on the master’s thesis Galanis presented at Trinity College in 2024. While researching mental health history for the Connecticut Museum’s timeline of LGBTQ+ history in 2019, Galanis found significant evidence of eugenics in Connecticut. She maintains that the Connecticut government collaborated with academic institutions like Yale University and agencies like the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, in New York, to deploy the racialized pseudoscience and its policies on its most vulnerable citizens.
Galanis’s lecture will examine the history of the eugenics movement and how it gained traction in Connecticut, and anti-eugenics, the groups of people who actively resisted eugenics to forge a path for human rights. Incorporating archival sources and oral history interviews from pioneers of the state’s first LGBTQ+ movement, Galanis will discuss how activism and the anti-eugenic struggle for autonomy are intertwined with oppressive ideas about health.
Galanis’s goal is for attendees to gain an understanding of the history of the eugenics movement in Connecticut and how it influenced state, national, and international politics. She also would like them to see how LGBTQ+ people fit within this narrative to actively resist bigotry and oppression, which transformed ideas about health and community. “While the pseudoscience was largely discredited after WWII, the legacies of eugenics are still alive today in our health systems, education, immigration, national, and international politics,” Galanis says.
image: Logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, New York City, 1922, American Philosophical Society.
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