The shocking story behind NYC’s Cooper Hewitt family

When Ann Cooper Hewitt was 3 years old, she was caught with her hand down her pants.

In the eyes of her mother and doctors back around 1920, this indicated that the girl was irreparably damaged, a “feebleminded” “idiot” with no chance of living a normal life. This began an odyssey of abuse that would later result in her being sterilized without her knowledge. “The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt,” (Grand Central Publishing) by Audrey Clare Farley, tells the sad and shocking tale of Cooper Hewitt, the daughter of famed engineer and inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt, and how her case reflected a time when eugenics was not only frighteningly common, but widely accepted in the US. (Farley notes that this is a work of “creative nonfiction,” namely, while the facts are true as stated, “some scenes, dialogue, and narrative details have been constructed for dramatic purposes.”)