Engendering Idiocy

One last interesting observation from Trent:

"Before the war, moral idiots were [...] almost always male, and like him they were portrayed as responding to the good efforts of the asylum to rescue them from their moral degeneracy. when the superintendents wrote about this type of idiot, their illustrations were of 'boys' who had improved both intellectually and morally under the tutelage of the institution. A decade after the war the discovery of female moral imbeciles, whose moral imbecility included the ability to bear illegitimate children, added a new urgency to the type. With their discovery, images like those of Grubb and other male moral idiots began to compete with new and more threatening images. In a few decades, the threat of a baby in the arm would substitute for the promise of a book in the hand" (Trent 23).