Criminal - Unfit

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

In August 1934, Ann Cooper Hewitt was having lunch with her mother when she suddenly felt pain in her abdomen. When she went to the doctor, he told her she would have to have her appendix removed. He ...never examined her abdomen.Β She later told papers that when she woke up fromΒ surgery, she heard a nurseΒ saying that Ann β€œdidn’t suspect a thing.” Audrey Clare Farley's book isΒ The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.Β  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:07 In August 1934, a 20-year-old named Ann Cooper Hewitt had lunch with her mother, Marion. They talked about what kind of life Ann wanted when she turned 21 and would no longer be a minor. They talked about Ann getting married, starting a family. And so they're dining, and she's suddenly struck with stomach pains. Author Audrey Claire Farley. And her mother has the chauffeur drive her to a hospital in San Francisco, which is where they lived. And there at the hospital, the family doctor is waiting. And he just says, well, Anne, I understand you have appendicitis.
Starting point is 00:01:45 But he never examined her abdomen. Instead, he takes her to another room where there's a psychologist. And that woman begins to ask her civics questions. So she says, what is the longest river in the United States? When was the Battle of Hastings fought? Questions like that. And Anne doesn't answer her. Instead, she says,
Starting point is 00:02:05 why are you asking me such asinine questions? So four days later, she returns to the hospital under the auspices of having her appendix removed. And I think that's very curious because today we tend to know that appendicitis is more of an acute issue. And when she's convalescing, she overhears her nurses talk about their, quote, idiot patient. And she begins to suspect that something is very wrong. Anne later told papers that she'd heard a nurse speaking to the family doctor and saying that Anne, quote, didn't suspect a thing. And then she said she heard the nurses talking about how brave her mother had been. One said, I can't imagine it was easy for her, but it was the right decision. Anne slowly realized that
Starting point is 00:03:00 in the last months that her mother was able to make medical decisions for her as a minor, her mother had made a big one. She had had Anne sterilized. And Anne thought she knew exactly why her mother wanted to make sure she couldn't have children. Anne's mother had had an affair with a man named Peter Cooper Hewitt. His grandfather had invented the gelatin dessert, later known as Jell-O, and designed the first steam locomotive in the U.S. Peter, who had inherited a huge amount of money, was an inventor as well, and 20 years older than Marion. She immediately attracted him in a way that his wife never had. And a lot of that was because she was beautiful,
Starting point is 00:03:47 and she was just very, very witty, and she had a way of entrancing men. Marion was always looking to improve her circumstances. At the time, marriage provided the only opportunity for a woman to better herself. Newspapers called Marion glamorous and mysterious. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that from the moment Peter Cooper Hewitt met her at a horse show, he was hopelessly lost.
Starting point is 00:04:15 And so they swiftly began an affair, and that affair went on for a few years. They had Anne before his wife finally divorced him. I think the birth of Anne was the final straw for her. How was this little baby received by mother and father? Well, Marianne loathed Anne from the beginning. She thought she was ugly. She was born prematurely. She weighed only three and a half pounds, and she suffered a lot with bronchial troubles, and the mom always thought of her as this ugly duckling. That was a word that she used to use with Anne, and she also resented Anne because Peter adored her. Anne reports that her mother would leave her in the crib for long periods of time, sometimes for the entire day.
Starting point is 00:05:12 But she would remember her father coming into the room and lifting her up out of her crib. And she says that's one of her earliest memories of him, is just him lifting her out of the crib and rescuing her. Anne said her father took her for walks around Paris, where they lived, and danced with her in the living room. She was his only child. Peter and Marion got married. It was Marion's third marriage and Peter's second. And then, when Anne was six years old, Peter started getting very sick. Eventually, he became so weak that he couldn't pick Anne up or leave the apartment. Meanwhile, gossip
Starting point is 00:05:55 started circulating that Anne's mother had started seeing a manager of the hotel where she and Peter lived in Paris. He was 24 years old and a baron. Audrey Claire Farley says Marion was interested in the baron's title. She visited bohemian hangouts in Paris with him and would invite him and friends up to her apartment, even when Peter was very sick. Peter's nurse once tried to kick them all out for being too loud and wild and knocking
Starting point is 00:06:26 things over. In response, Marion fired the nurse. But she had to rehire her because she couldn't find another nurse who spoke English. A few weeks later, Peter was transferred to a hospital to consult with lung specialists. The same nurse later reported that while he was in the hospital, Marion had tried to convince her to give Peter a mysterious drink. Now, she defended herself by saying that it was a painkiller, it was something that the Baron had given her, and the newspapers never really got to the bottom of it, but they did suspect her of wanting to hurry things along.
Starting point is 00:07:10 Not long after, Peter Cooper Hewitt died. His estate was estimated to be worth more than $4 million in 1921, which would be almost $60 million today. He had adjusted his will just three weeks before he died. And what did his will say? The will stipulated that two-thirds of the inheritance went to Anne and one-third went to Anne's mother. But it said that Anne's share reverted back to her mother if she died childless. That clear? Yes.
Starting point is 00:07:53 I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. After Anne's father died, her mother married the young baron and sent Anne away to an institution in the Swiss Alps. She would often tell the directors at institutions that Anne was sex-crazed. She claimed that Anne had been addicted to masturbation since she was three years old and that she refused to be educated, that she was very ornery with governesses. Marianne also told school directors about a time Anne was discovered in bed with a boy when she was eight years old. And it was the first person her age that she had connected with,
Starting point is 00:08:44 and she was found in bed with him by another nurse. And there was nothing going on. The two were just, you know, laying in bed together. So this reputation, you know, would precede her. She'd go to, from one school to the other, and when she'd get there, the mother would say, I don't know what to do with her. Exactly. And so when her mother would go to an institution and say, here's my daughter, here is everything that's wrong with her, that gossip would work its way from the directors to the teachers down to the students. So the students would also treat Anne as if she was this pariah and echo a lot of the gossip that they had heard from the adults. She was always an outcast, even with her peers.
Starting point is 00:09:35 And then as a teenager, her mother would forbid her from having friends, and she would often introduce Anne to people as being a moron. So if they were in the company of people that they'd never met before, she would say, oh, don't mind her, she's a moron. And people sort of took Marian at her word for this. And so often she would try to make friends with the help. She developed a close relationship with the chauffeur and even did think about running away with him. But it was in large part because she wanted to get away from her mother.
Starting point is 00:10:11 So she was beginning to rebel a little bit. Anne and her mother spent a lot of time at a hotel on the ocean, the Hotel del Coronado, outside of San Diego. When Anne turned 20, the manager at the hotel planned a big party for her. It was a big deal because Anne hadn't had a real birthday party since her father died. The hotel staff arranged for lots of flowers and invited other young people who lived in the hotel. When Anne's mother found out, she was furious. She told the manager,
Starting point is 00:10:47 I want you to understand I'm no pauper. Get out of here and mind your own business. Anne said she almost died of embarrassment. There was no party. That was one month before Anne and her mother had lunch at the hotel, when Anne suddenly felt a strange pain in her abdomen. So I suspect what happened is that the mother put something in her drink to make her feel sick and set her plan in motion. Her mother arranged for her to have her appendix removed. So when she goes to the hospital to have this surgery,
Starting point is 00:11:29 the doctors remove her fallopian tubes along with her appendix. Anne didn't know what had been done to her, but she did think there was something odd about the way the nurses were talking about her. Something was off. She remembers how her mother had previously ranted odd about the way the nurses were talking about her. Something was off. She remembers how her mother had previously ranted about what a moron she was and how she'd make a terrible mother. And so she kind of puts two and two together and
Starting point is 00:11:54 realizes with horror what her mother's done. But also in the back of her mind she knows that if she dies without having children, all the money reverts to her mother. Yeah, she did. We'll be right back. Their frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Don't receive Botox Cosmetic if you have a skin infection. Side effects may include allergic reactions, injection site pain, headache,
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Starting point is 00:13:33 Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts.
Starting point is 00:14:08 After Ann Cooper Hewitt's surgery, she went to her mother's apartment to recover. She later told reporters that she had been kept in her room, and that her mother had removed the telephone so she couldn't make any calls. When Ann turned 21 and was no longer a minor, she finally had access to the money her father had left her and moved out of her mother's apartment. She got a lawyer who determined that Anne had been given a mental test, been deemed, quote, deficient and sterilized without her knowledge.
Starting point is 00:14:42 Anne filed a $500,000 lawsuit against her mother and the doctors involved in the surgery. Audrey Claire Farley reports that Marion paid two doctors $9,000 each to advise on and perform the surgery. It normally only cost hundreds of dollars. And Marion did it, allegedly, with money from her daughter's trust fund.
Starting point is 00:15:08 When the lawsuit was announced on January 6, 1936, Anne made a public statement to the papers. She said, I had no dolls when I was little, and I'll have no children when I'm old. That's my story. One of the reporters asked if Anne thought her mother planned to kill her, since the will stipulated she wouldn't receive Anne's portion of the inheritance until after her death. Anne's lawyer responded, Mrs. Cooper Hewitt has always
Starting point is 00:15:40 said that her daughter is sickly. She has also refused to acknowledge her own aging. The woman probably presumed her life expectancy exceeded her daughter's. One of the doctors accused in Anne's lawsuit told papers that he had performed the surgery at the request of Anne's mother because she was afraid that Anne's mental condition might lead her into, quote,
Starting point is 00:16:05 moral difficulties. The term Anne's mental condition might lead her into, quote, moral difficulties. The term Anne's mother used was feebleminded. What does feebleminded even mean? Well, at the time, it could mean epileptic, it could mean sexual deviance, and that's what the definition that Marian was leaning upon. Feeblem-minded just means weak-minded, and at this time, disability and intellectual deficiencies and promiscuity were all perceived to be the same thing. So, if a woman was thought to be promiscuous, it was just assumed that she was intellectually defective.
Starting point is 00:16:48 And that's what Marion tried to prove with Anne, that she was promiscuous and therefore she is a defective and should not reproduce. The day after Anne filed her civil lawsuit, San Francisco District Attorney Matthew Brady called for a criminal investigation into Anne's allegations. He believed the doctors, as well as Anne's mother, could be charged with mayhem, a felony which was defined as unlawful and malicious removal of a member of a human being, or the disabling or disfiguring thereof, or rendering it useless. There were two questions. Whether Anne had actually been disfigured by the removal of her fallopian tubes and whether her mother and the doctors
Starting point is 00:17:34 who advised on and performed the procedure had legal justification to prevent Anne from having children due to her, quote, unfitness. A hearing was held to determine whether criminal charges could be brought. The judge questioned the state psychiatrist who had given Anne the intelligence test before her surgery, the one that included questions like, what is the longest river in the U.S.?
Starting point is 00:18:01 The test had determined that Anne had the mental age of an 11-year-old. The judge asked the psychiatrist to give him that same test. When the psychiatrist concluded that the judge had a mental age of 12, the judge said, I thought it was nearer 8. The judge told Anne that, I know very few who think as clearly as you do. He signed a warrant on February 4th for the arrest of Anne's mother and the two doctors. He said, The necessity and the desire to bear children is something not idly to be interfered with. Newspapers reported on Anne's case every day, debating whether or not Anne's mother had done the right thing.
Starting point is 00:18:49 They printed opinions from rabbis, ministers, psychiatrists, and even novelists. And the public was discovering that sterilization was more common than they might have imagined. Anne's family doctor, who ordered the operation, Dr. Tillman, told the San Francisco examiner that there are many girls in San Francisco who have been sterilized and do not know it. There are many more in state hospitals. Sterilization isn't an uncommon operation, and if it were necessary that such an operation be performed on my own daughter, I wouldn't tell her. How did this practice come about? What was the use for it, and how was it being done rather involuntarily a lot of times?
Starting point is 00:19:39 So the idea for sterilization came from eugenics. And eugenics was actually the brainchild of an English intellectual, Sir Francis Galton, who was a cousin of Charles Darwin. And after reading Darwin's ideas on evolution, Galton began to wonder if humans could improve breeding practices to create a better society. Now, he came from a very noble family, and he was irritated that families like his had to support the lower classes. He thought that poor disabled people and criminals had defective genes, and that if people in his milieu had more children, then the traits that were associated with his family and with the upper class, intelligence, discipline could proliferate. So he advocated what would eventually become known as positive eugenics. So his ideas work their way across the Atlantic,
Starting point is 00:20:40 and they inspire a man named Charles Davenport. Only Davenport didn't want to just encourage upper-class women to reproduce. He wanted to supplement Galton's positive eugenics with what would become known as negative eugenics. And negative eugenics is preventing the unfit from reproducing. So in 1910, Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office, and he hired a bunch of field workers who went out into the countryside and into immigrant neighborhoods to collect pedigrees from people. And these field workers wanted to know, for instance, if anyone had an alcoholic uncle or a promiscuous daughter, or if they had six fingers or toes. They believed, just as Galton did, that these social conditions, like poverty, were genetically inherited. And they
Starting point is 00:21:34 wanted to convince lawmakers that there was a pervasive problem. So they used this data, which was, of course, terribly unscientific, to persuade state legislatures to pass sterilization laws and to restrict immigration and prevent interracial mixing. Authorities were very fearful about the future of the white race, and they thought that the white race was going to be polluted by all these undesirables and that they needed to protect its purity. And so part of that project of protecting the purity of the white race was purging the weakest members, the so-called white trash. And so in that project of guaranteeing white supremacy, a lot of whites, those who were disabled, who were thought to be
Starting point is 00:22:25 promiscuous, those who were poor, became collateral victims. California enacted its forced sterilization law in 1909, one of the first in the nation. And by 1921, more than 2,200 people had been sterilized in California, mostly in prisons and institutions. At the time, California accounted for 80% of all sterilization cases in the country. Other states began enacting their own laws allowing involuntary sterilization, but some of them were being challenged and found to be unconstitutional. In New Jersey and Iowa, for example, involuntary sterilization was said to be cruel and unusual punishment
Starting point is 00:23:14 in violation of equal protection and due process. Eugenicists wanted to find a way to get sterilization on more solid legal footing. So they found a test case that ended up going all the way to the Supreme Court. A Virginia woman named Carrie Buck had become pregnant when she was 16 years old after a relative of her foster parents raped her. She gave birth to a daughter in 1924, and her foster parents committed her to a state institution
Starting point is 00:23:47 where her fallopian tubes were removed under the state's new sterilization law. Carrie had been deemed feeble-minded, in part because she was an unwed mother and therefore considered promiscuous. And with Carrie Buck, they planned to take her case as far as they could to codify eugenics into law. So before they sterilized her, they arranged to have her become a test case. Her attorney was in cahoots with the directors of the institution where she was to be sterilized, which was the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. And so sure enough, because her attorney was working not to her benefit, the case did go all the way to the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court
Starting point is 00:24:41 ruled that the state of Virginia did have the right to forcibly sterilize her. And in the process of that case, people argued that Carrie's mother was a moron, and Carrie's daughter was a moron, and the justice in the case famously wrote, three generations of imbeciles is enough. The justice was Oliver Wendell Holmes. He also wrote, it is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. With his ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the legality of involuntary sterilization of women who, like Anne, had been deemed feeble-minded.
Starting point is 00:25:37 It was a huge victory for eugenics. Seventeen states revised or enacted sterilization laws over the next four years. Not only were states passing these laws, but churches and popular culture were spreading the message of responsible breeding. A lot of liberal Protestant ministers preached sermons on eugenics. State fairs had these contests, which they would subject people to the same inspection that livestock underwent. Contestants would win ribbons for these creamy complexion or nicely arched noses. They were basically being measured for their whiteness. But there developed this scientific criticism, and people pointed out that, you know, maybe poverty isn't an inherited
Starting point is 00:26:27 trait, just like blue eyes or brown hair. They begin to say that the inheritance of positive and negative traits is a lot more complicated than eugenicists pretend. And then the Nazi party begins to gain global attention for its programs. Now, in the early 1930s, the party, of course, was still in its infancy, and the full horror of their programs hadn't been carried out. But the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws, which forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jews, and also selected children for sterilization. And Americans really bristled at what was going on in Europe. And some began to wonder, you know, if it was so wise to be making decisions about entire classes of people. In 1936, when Ann Cooper Hewitt fought back, it was an enormous news story,
Starting point is 00:27:31 and eugenicists were following closely. At first, they tried to distance themselves from the case. They realized that this mother-daughter spat might cast a negative light on sterilization programs. And they were especially afraid that sympathy for Anne might translate into negative sentiment or scrutiny towards laws. One leader in the eugenics movement in California was Ezra Gosney, the president and founder of what was called the Human Betterment Foundation.
Starting point is 00:28:04 He wrote an editorial arguing that Ann's case didn't have anything to do with California sterilization laws, which only concerned sterilization in public institutions. But at the same time, he emphasizes there's no law against sterilization in private practice, and that many people actually regard sterilization in private practice as the next phase of the eugenics movement. So he's kind of doing a bit of a two-step. He's saying, you know, don't let this mother-daughter spat color your view of genics, and also maybe this case signals a new path for eugenics. And so because he publishes that piece, he caught the attention of the doctor's attorney. The doctors who had sterilized Anne.
Starting point is 00:28:50 Their attorney wrote to Ezra Gosney and asked him and his colleagues to consult on their defense strategy. And they do initially refuse because, again, they wanted to distance sterilization from this tabloid case. But they eventually agree. They advised the lawyers not to bother making an argument that Marion was a good mother trying to act in her child's best interest. In fact, the eugenicists thought it might not be a bad thing if the jury thought Marion was a bad mother. Because they thought the fact of Marion being a poor mother actually proved Anne's unfitness. So they say Anne grew up in this terrible domestic environment, and as a result, she's going to make a terrible mother herself. Almost immediately after Anne had announced her lawsuit, her mother left California for New Jersey.
Starting point is 00:29:48 But of course she did have to respond to the charges. And so she files an affidavit which states her reasons for sterilizing Anne. And she claims that Anne is feeble-minded, that she's addicted to masturbation and has been since three years of age, that she refused to be educated, that she had this preference for men in uniform, which meant working class men. And she tells of how Anne tried to run away with the chauffeur. She claims that Anne wrote love letters to this chauffeur and that she intercepted these letters, although she said that she had to destroy them so she couldn't produce them as evidence.
Starting point is 00:30:32 And so, you know, she's appealing to these fears that people had in order to, you know, gain sympathy for her choice to sterilize Anne. How did Anne start to build her case against her mother? Well, she retaliated to Marion's claims by saying, it wasn't me, it was my mother who had this riotous life. And she cited how her mother had an addiction to alcohol and gambling, and she'd squandered Anne's inheritance money at all of these casinos across the world. And so her strategy was to say, it's my mother who was a bad mother. And I think this really explains why the case riveted the public, because from the first, we have two women
Starting point is 00:31:20 who are each accusing the other of being unfit for motherhood. Newspapers covering the case almost always mentioned that Anne's mother had been married five times. They would refer to her with all her married names at once in a huge hyphenated list. They called Anne the duped girl and the sterile heiress. Both women were characterized as liking sex too much. One newspaper called the case daughter versus mother drama. Thank you. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to eat healthier,
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Starting point is 00:33:29 And since everyone's journey is different, so are your daily lessons. They're personalized to help you reach your goal. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. Ann Cooper Hewitt's mother was still in New Jersey when she heard that there was a warrant for her arrest in California for her role in sterilizing her daughter. She checked into a hotel under a fake name, accompanied by a nurse, and said she was very ill. Police couldn't find her for weeks. There were rumors circulating about where she might be. One person claimed he saw her in London.
Starting point is 00:34:14 When they finally did find her, she was in a hospital. They learned that she had been brought in a week before, after taking a large amount of sleeping pills. When she was asked about it, Anne said, I'm sorry, of course. I would be sorry to learn that anyone I knew had attempted suicide. But there is no use pretending a relationship that doesn't exist. I think that they were communicating to each other through the press. And Anne knew that her mother was reading about her. And so she wanted to show that she was happy, she was independent, she didn't need her mother anymore. And one way that she tried to show this was by not dyeing her hair.
Starting point is 00:34:55 So her mother, who her whole life had said, you know, you're so ugly, used to make her dye her hair this platinum blonde. And Anne refused to dye her hair, and she made sure to be photographed with her dark hair as a way of showing her mother that she was now independent from her. She didn't need her. She was her own woman. Anne's mother stayed in the hospital for months. Her lawyers reported that she would be unable to make the trip across the country for a trial. So the San Francisco district attorney decided to go ahead and try the two doctors.
Starting point is 00:35:30 The trial began on August 14, 1936. The jury was made up of nine men, and as newspapers reported, quote, three childless women. On the first day, the defense called Anne a pawn and said she was being manipulated into accusing her mother and the doctors, manipulated by her lawyer and by her mother's first husband, who they argued were after Anne's inheritance. They also suggested that the lawsuit was Anne's attempt to kill her mother, creating so much
Starting point is 00:36:05 emotional shock that Marion would die and Anne's inheritance would get even bigger. Anne responded that the defendant's lawyer was perfectly correct in stating there has been a conspiracy. He has failed, however, to correctly identify the conspirators. The court adjourned over the weekend. Newspapers reported that the defense planned to emphasize the mental test Anne had taken. One of the questions on the test asked her to name the colors of the American flag. Anne said red, white, and blue. But she was given a score of zero on the question, because, according to the test, white was not a color.
Starting point is 00:36:51 When court resumed, Anne's lawyer pointed out that the doctor who had performed the surgery had initially denied that he'd done anything other than remove Anne's appendix, and only later admitted that they'd sterilized her. In response, the defense again accused Anne's appendix, and only later admitted that they'd sterilized her. In response, the defense again accused Anne's lawyer of manipulating his client in an effort to get at her inheritance. On the third day of the trial, the defense argued that the doctors couldn't have committed a crime because the laws in California did not prohibit sterilization, and they had had written authorization from Anne's guardian, her mother. On the fourth day, the judge dismissed the case.
Starting point is 00:37:33 He ruled that no crime had been committed. He said if the laws in California lead to situations which are seemingly unjust, the remedy is with the legislature and not the courts. I have a picture of Anne that I think about a lot, and it's soon after she's learned that the judge has thrown out the charges. And according to the information on the back of the picture, I imagine reporters are like clamoring for her attention, and she just sort of looks over her shoulder, and she has the saddest expression on her face,
Starting point is 00:38:11 and there are tears in her eyes, and she just wants to, like, flee, but they're still ready to capture her pain and to profit from it. The assistant district attorney, August Fortner, said the San Francisco District Attorney's Office would appeal the decision. He said, It is a terrible blow to the youth of California.
Starting point is 00:38:35 Now any parent can have any child unsexed for any reason. This case sets a damn bad precedent, and you can quote me on that damn. I imagine that this loss for Anne would have kind of been a boon for sterilization doctors at the time. It absolutely was, and it revived eugenics right at this moment when it was on life support because of the scientific criticism that was beginning to dog the movement and because of the increasing fears that eugenics was like what the Nazis were doing over in Europe. And so after Anne's case, attention shifted from genetic defects to domestic ones. So eugenicists had already been suffering as a result of the shoddy science of heredity. And Anne's case really provided the opportunity for them to shift focus from proving genetic defect to proving bad home life. So this really opens the door for who can be called
Starting point is 00:39:48 unfit for motherhood. And as a result, people began to target more women of color for sterilization because, especially in California, there were a lot of women of Mexican descent who tended to have larger families, often because of their Catholic faith. You know, they didn't use birth control because of their religion. And so officials in California perceive these women to be feeble-minded because they're, quote, hyper-breeders and they produce low-quality children. And so in this case, something as simple as family size becomes justification for sterilization. Anne's case also helped to move sterilization from public institutions to private practice. And private practice really sort of takes over the job
Starting point is 00:40:44 that these asylums had done for the first few decades of the century. So you have people bringing in their wives, daughters to have the procedure done? Well, often it would be social workers who target people. And in California, you know, social workers would find women and say, you know, you have five children, therefore you're oversexed. So in some cases, women still were going to institutions to be sterilized. But often, if it was in private practice, it could be without their knowledge. And so in the South, especially, there became a term called Mississippi appendectomy, which referred to the frequency with which a woman would go into a public hospital for some sort of abdominal procedure and come home without a uterus. It really became a pervasive fear that women had there.
Starting point is 00:41:43 And so a lot of these sterilizations that are taking place go unrecorded. And again, that's because they're not in an asylum where there's better record keeping. And it's also because doctors are not recording them as involuntary. They would, you know, maybe approach a woman who is under the influence of pain medication and ask, you know, maybe approach a woman who is under the influence of pain medication and to ask, you know, does she want to be sterilized? And so a woman obviously cannot give consent under those conditions. And so, you know, a lot of them just weren't being recorded. After the case against Ann Cooper Hewitt's doctors was dismissed, the San Francisco District Attorney still thought they had a case against Ann's mother,
Starting point is 00:42:31 but only if Ann agreed to testify. Ann refused. And part of that was probably because Ann was tired of the attention, but I also think that she had sympathy for her mother because of the way that her mother had been trashed in the newspapers for a year just like she had, and her mother had had all her dirty laundry aired just like she had, and was dehumanized in the same ways that she was. Without Anne's testimony, the prosecutor was forced to drop the charges.
Starting point is 00:43:10 Marion stayed on the East Coast and never returned to California. Anne married soon after the trial, but the marriage didn't work out. She received 10,000 letters in the months after her lawsuit, many of them marriage proposals. Her lawyer said Anne told him to throw them into the furnace. She told a reporter, When I do marry, it will be for love, and not to someone who proposes, before they even know me.
Starting point is 00:43:43 When the reporter asked what love meant to her, Anne replied, My idea of love is this, mutual understanding, admiration, and affection. She ended up marrying five men, just like her mother. And it was during her second or third marriage that she received news that her mother was trying to contact her. So the operator said that her mother had called and that she wanted to make amends. And Anne really wrestled with whether or not she was going to call her mother back. And she didn't call her mother back before she learned that her mother had died of a stroke over on the East Coast. Marion Cooper Hewitt died alone in a small apartment. Anne was photographed getting off the airplane to attend the funeral.
Starting point is 00:44:40 She had dyed her hair blonde again. Photographers, you know, snapped pictures of her. She was one of the few people at the burial crying for her mother. In a way, her mother was still the closest person in her life. In a way, you know, the fact that they were both on trial for the same thing, being unfit for motherhood, bonded them in a way that they had never been bonded before. Ann Cooper Hewitt eventually moved to Mexico, where she lived with her husband, Frank Nicholson,
Starting point is 00:45:15 also known as Rodeo Roy. In 1955, Frank Nicholson wrote in a letter, We live on a ranch, 15-minute drive south of Monterey, Orange Groves, do all right and happy. Anne died of cancer the next year. She was 41. Four sterilizations continued after Anne's death, even after they eventually became illegal.
Starting point is 00:45:50 The victims were primarily women of color. In the 60s and 70s, sterilization procedures are reported to have been performed on one in four Native American women without their knowledge or consent. And more recently, stories of women being sterilized while incarcerated or detained have appeared. In September of 2020, a nurse working in an ICE detention center in Georgia filed a whistleblower complaint, claiming that detainees were undergoing unnecessary gynecological surgeries.
Starting point is 00:46:26 More than 40 women submitted written testimonies describing abuse. The whistleblower said that after the women got up from general anesthesia, they'd ask, Why did I have this surgery? ΒΆΒΆ Lauren Spohr, and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Susanna Robertson is our producer. Engineering by Russ Henry. Audio mix by Johnny Vince Evans, Michael Raphael, and Rob Byers of Final Final V2.
Starting point is 00:47:14 Julian Alexander creates original illustrations for each episode. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com where we have t-shirts and hats and water bottles too. Audrey Claire Farley's book about Ann Cooper Hewitt is called The Unfit Heiress, The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt.
Starting point is 00:47:35 Follow us online and let us know what you think about the story, or if you have another story you'd like to hear us cover. We're on Twitter at Criminal Show, Instagram at criminal underscore podcast, and on Facebook at This is Criminal. Our other show, This is Love, is back with new episodes every month. Our latest is called On the Way to Dinner. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia from PRX. Botox Cosmetic, adipotulinum toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults.
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