Eugenics Survey Field Worker, 1925-1927
Field Agent, Vermont Children's Aid Society, 1920-25, 1928-38
Harriett Abbott, a graduate of Vassar College in 1895 and the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy in 1915, had many years of experience in child welfare work before coming to Vermont. She served as an investigator for the Illinois Children's Home and Aid Society, an agent for the New York State Charities Aid Association, and Director of the Peoria Children's Bureau and the Children's Home and Aid Society. In 1920, the Vermont Children's Aid Society hired Abbott as district agent for its first branch office in Bellows Falls, Vermont, which served Windham, Winsdor, Bennington, and Rutland counties. Her salary, transportation, and office expenses were supplied by the Thomas Thompson Trust.
Abbott's investigations of the families of dependent children in 1920-1925
provided considerable data on southern Vermont families for the Eugenics
Survey's "pedigrees of degenerate families." In 1923 she trained at the
Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor and incorporated eugenics methods
and 
assumptions into her work with Vermont children. In 1925 the Vermont Children's
Aid Society released her to the Eugenics Survey for its first investigations
of Vermont's social problem families. For the next two and a half years,
Abbott collected information on fifty five families in Vermont (over six
thousand individuals) and made detailed studies of ten of these families
to demonstrate their allegedly "poor heredity," their cost to the taxpayers,
and their contribution to Vermont's "dependent, delinquent, and mentally
deficient" populations. (See
Roots
;
Family Studies/Louis' Story
)
Harriett Abbott left the Survey in 1928 for additional training in psychology. She returned to the Vermont Children's Aid Society where she worked as a district agent in St. Johnsbury until 1938. She died in Burlington in July, 1939.