INTERPRETING THE GENETIC REVOLUTION: A HISTORY OF GENETIC

This dissertation explores the social history of genetic counseling in the United States between 1930 and 2000. I situate genetic counselors at the interstices of medicine, science, and an increasingly “geneticized ” American society. My study emphasizes two central themes in the history of genetic counseling. First, genetic counselors have played a crucial role in bridging the “old eugenics ” and the “new genetics ” (both temporally and ideologically) as mediators of genetic reproductive technologies. Genetic counselors have negotiated the rights and responsibilities of genetic citizens in their personal patient encounters. Discourses of privilege and duty were also extrapolated outward to public debates about the new genetics, demonstrating the highly-politicized contexts in which counselors practice and women make reproductive choices. Second, I interrogate the professionalization process of genetic counseling from a field led by male physician-geneticists in the 1940s and 50s, to a profession dominated by women with Masters degrees by the 1980s and 90s. Thi