Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890-1960

Abstract

Reformers, male and female, combined middle-class notions of sexual moral- ity with the language of eugenics, which was ubiquitous in early twentieth- century America, to construct a problematic girl whose sexual delinquency and "feeblemindedness" were mutually constitutive. The first three chapters of the book trace the development and enactment of the 1915 involuntary commitment law, and chronicle young women's experience as they were classified by new social service agencies such as the Juvenile Protective Association, adjudicated by Chicago's juvenile courts, and remanded to institutions, including the Illinois Colony for the Feebleminded, later renamed the Lincoln State School.

Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890-1960. By m i C h A e l A . r e m B i s . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Pp. 227. $50.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper).

For the past one hundred years, virtually every generation of Americans has seemed determined to discover a "girl problem." And the problem-whether cast as precocious maturity, teen pregnancy, or ribald public behavior-has almost always been rooted in girls' sexuality. In Defining Deviance, Michael A. Rembis uses the State Training School for Girls in Geneva, Illinois, as a case study to examine how Progressive era reformers sought to define, and confine, girls who they believed were a threat to both the state and the "race." Reformers, male and female, combined middle-class notions of sexual moral- ity with the language of eugenics, which was ubiquitous in early twentieth- century America, to construct a problematic girl whose sexual delinquency and "feeblemindedness" were mutually constitutive. Illinois was not alone in its anxiety about this "menace"-forty-three states had established institutions for the feeble-minded by the mid-1920s-but it was at the fore, passing one of the nation's first eugenic commitment laws in July 1915.

Defining Deviance is a slim volume, 130 pages divided into six chapters, leaving the author scant room to flesh out all of the intriguing arguments he raises in the introduction. Although Rembis repeatedly stresses that his is not an institutional histor y, he has uncovered a fascinating case in the Geneva Training School. Rembis, a scholar of disability studies, brings an admirably ambitious agenda to bear on his story: his work's stated purpose is "to reveal the centrality of sex, class, gender, and disability in the forma- tion of both scientific and social reform discourse" (3). But such broad concepts are arguably best understood in their particular interrelationships and most clearly revealed when they are articulated by individuals in pursuit of specific social and political goals. Rembis does a fantastic job, for example, in detailing how the administrators and physicians who supported Geneva fused together their judgments about girls' intellect, character, and virtue, creating a category of sexual, social, and cultural disability that locked girls into a virtually inescapable institutional grip. He also shows that despite a nationwide movement away from belief in a strictly hereditary determin- ism over the inter war and World War II eras, the staff at Geneva remained convinced of the eugenic underpinning of girls' alleged sexual misconduct and inferior intellect. Here more of an institutional history would have served him well, as the institution displayed such a unique position.

The first three chapters of the book trace the development and enactment of the 1915 involuntary commitment law, and chronicle young women's experience as they were classified by new social service agencies such as the Juvenile Protective Association, adjudicated by Chicago's juvenile courts, and remanded to institutions, including the Illinois Colony for the Feebleminded, later renamed the Lincoln State School. Much of the national backdrop to these chapters, from the doings of Eugenics Record Office field workers and the US Army's use of intelligence testing on World War I recruits, is familiar historical terrain. But Rembis is particularly interested in the ways in which newly professionalized women took up the cause of eugenic commitment as their own. He is perfectly correct to focus on these women, who while not part of the national eugenic intelligentsia were nevertheless important to the continued commitment to eugenic principles since they served as field workers, administrators, case workers, and judges. Although he carefully documents their presence, Rembis does not fully explain why and precisely how they involved themselves in Geneva. Was it just one more new employ- ment opportunity for newly professionalized Progressive era women? Or did these arguments that linked low intelligence and "deviant" sexuality to a dysgenic heredity among working-class and poor girls somehow help women to justify their own presence in the professional workforce? Was it a way to exonerate their own daughters, who were being increasingly drawn into a highly sexualized consumer culture? Rembis passes over these questions but does not allot them the space they deserve.

Defining Deviance is at its best when Rembis turns to the lives of the young women caught up in Geneva. He combines a clear eye for archival material with a palpable empathy for the girls whose lives were altered, and sometimes destroyed, by the self-righteous treatment they received at the hands of reformers. His empathy infuses and animates a powerful vignette that opens the book's introduction. Seventeen-year-old Dora Mae, incarcer- ated in Geneva in 1940, found herself caught in a Wonderlandesque trap. Any action, anything she said was turned and twisted into evidence of her guilt. Correct answers were manipulative, wrong answers were just wrong. A desire for continued schooling was proof that she could not face her limita- tions; failure to perform in school, proof of a lack of ability. Throughout the book, Rembis is unsparing in his criticism of the ways in which standard- ized testing, examination procedures, institution rules, and court-ordered treatments converged on the bodies, minds, and spirits of young women to define them as deviant at ever y turn. He examines his sources carefully to reproduce the shocking lexicon of disability that reformers created in order to classify the girls. They are "dull" and "defective," "immoral" and "incorrigible," "subnormal, weak-willed and deficient." And always, always, these mental and character flaws affect their sexual appetites and behaviors.

In the face of what must have been an almost unbearable weight of judg- ment, some girls at Geneva attempted to push back within, and perhaps against, the system-running away, self-cutting, and becoming "hysterical" in an effort to assert some personal agency or claim some form of atten- tion. Rembis does not glamorize these behaviors or dismiss them but rather reads them with great care. These acts were likely not "conscious displays of resistance," he writes, but girls' ways of "working through severe emo- tional and psychological pain" (107). Some of that pain was due to the life conditions that sent girls to Geneva; some of it they found there.