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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...