“Through no fault of their own”: Josephine Dauphinee and the “Subnormal” Pupils of the Vancouver School System, 1911-1941

Abstract

This article concerns the career of an early British Columbia teacher, Miss Josephine Dauphinee. She was the first teacher in the province to teach children labelled as feeble-minded in segregated special classes within the Vancouver school system. Dauphinee’s teaching career would be remarkable for that fact alone but the social and political motivation behind her special-class work was her life-long belief in eugenics. She saw herself as a progressive activist; by promoting the segregation of feeble-minded schoolchildren, she sought to advance the social logic of eugenics into the political realm. With the aid of local women’s groups, Dauphinee lobbied successfully for a sexual sterilization law and up until the last days of her teaching life followed an outmoded form of mental hygiene based on eugenic hereditarianism