Tagged: carceral state, Elisabeth Israels Perry, eugenics, history of medicine, Progressive Era, women's history
By Dr. Anya Jabour
July 13, 2021
This is the first in a series of blog posts on women’s history and the long Progressive Era, honoring the legacy of the late Elisabeth Israels Perry. Perry served as SHGAPE President from 1998-2000 and had a long and distinguished career that highlighted women’s political activism in GAPE and in the “long Progressive Era” that stretched into the 1920s and 1930s. This blog series coincides with the July issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, which includes a roundtable (now available to subscribers online) on Perry’s After the Vote: Feminist Politics in La Guardia’s New York (2019). Read the other posts in the series here and find the CFP here.
An “Adamless Eden for Female Offenders”?
In 1912, journalist Ida Tarbell wrote an admiring article about Katharine Bement Davis, the first superintendent of New York’s Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills (commonly known as Bedford Reformatory). In keeping with the aims of women’s reformatories, Tarbell explained, Davis had made Bedford a site of rehabilitation rather than retribution. With “Good Will to Women” and “an apparently exhaustless source of cheerful energy,” Davis had instituted a program of schoolwork, physical exercise, domestic chores, religious instruction, and “a varied program of dances and entertainment.” Comparing the reformatory to a boarding school rather than a prison, Tarbell concluded that Bedford was “as hopeful an institution as there is in this country.”[1]
By the time Tarbell penned her laudatory account, however, Davis—like other directors of female reformatories—had become disillusioned by what she saw as an increasing proportion of “incorrigibles” among her inmates. In her quest for explanations for this “most difficult class” of offender, she equated immorality with criminality and moral failings with mental incapacity.[2] Adopting prevailing eugenic theories about intelligence testing and heritable criminality, she ultimately recommended the permanent institutionalization of those she deemed irredeemably immoral.
Katharine Bement Davis (1860-1935) was the first superintendent of the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills. Courtesy Library of Congress.
An examination of Davis’s tenure at the Bedford Reformatory offers important insights into women’s role in the carceral state. A quintessential “New Woman,” Davis was a member of the first generation of college-educated women who pioneered new professions. Like many of her contemporaries, even after earning her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, she found that higher education did not necessarily translate into professional opportunities. Instead of pursuing a career in academia, she entered the new field of social work, focusing on prison reform. From 1901 through 1913, she directed the Bedford Reformatory, which one newspaper dubbed an “Adamless Eden For Female Offenders.”[3]
When Davis first assumed her post, she was determined to make New York’s first female reformatory a shining example of penal reform. Before taking the job, the former schoolteacher announced: “My only interest in accepting the superintendency is my desire to make an educational institution of it. I have no desire to be the warden of a prison.” Drawing on her own college experience, the Vassar alumna explained that her goal was to make Bedford “to its inmates what an ideal college is to a college student, a stepping stone towards a happier and more useful life.”[4]
Davis, who enjoyed drama and music, encouraged Bedford’s inmates to stage their own theatrical productions, which encouraged creativity and imparted moral messages. Courtesy New York Times.
At Bedford, Davis not only implemented a plan to “re-educate” female offenders, but also hired a cohort of female professionals to assist her in her work—which ultimately included testing and classifying inmates. At the same time that Davis and her colleagues helped to construct the carceral state and carve out a place for female professionals in it, they built their careers at the expense of working-class, Black, and immigrant women categorized as mentally and morally inferior and institutionalized against their will. Davis’s career in penal reform reveals that women played a central role in creating the carceral state in Progressive-era New York, with profound implications for contemporary American society.
Reforming Women
Bedford owed its existence to the nineteenth-century female reformatory movement, which justified women’s leadership based on Victorian assumptions about elite white women’s moral superiority and their commitment to uplifting their fallen sisters. These ideas persisted even as the next generation adopted new ideas about sexuality and morality. Davis’s contradictory views reflected these shifting dynamics. In public lectures, Davis called for a single sexual standard, which she defined as “the so-called woman’s standard, imposing chastity and continence outside of the marriage relation on both men and women.” However, unlike some feminist reformers in both the US and the UK, Davis advocated aggressively prosecuting suspected prostitutes. “I do not agree that if one innocent girl is arrested on the street it discredits our whole system,” she pronounced. Indeed, she insisted that she had never encountered an innocent defendant.[5]
In keeping with Progressive ideas about the best environment for reform, Bedford Hills was built on the “cottage plan.” After intake in the Reception Building, inmates were assigned to smaller residences. Those who complied with the rules earned a position in the Honor Cottage, where the inmates practiced limited self-government. Courtesy Westchester County Historical Society.
Ironically, while Davis condemned the sexual double standard, her charges found themselves at Bedford because of it. Bedford’s inmates—girls and women between the ages of sixteen and thirty—were confined for a variety of reasons, ranging from minor offenses to serious crimes. According to Davis, while only 40 percent had been arrested as “common prostitutes,” the vast majority (nearly 70 percent) had been arrested for “public order” offenses, ranging from loitering to “waywardness.” These imprecise categories meant that women often were arrested and imprisoned not only for engaging in sex work but also for other behaviors —such as public intoxication or nonmarital sex—that were not technically crimes, but which violated prevailing standards of feminine propriety. Meanwhile, men’s sexual behavior was neither stigmatized nor criminalized.
Unperturbed either by the vague definitions of women’s offenses or by the gender-specific application of laws criminalizing prostitution, Davis opined that “a very large proportion of those convicted of disorderly conduct and public intoxication were immoral women.” Indeed, she unequivocally asserted that “the fundamental fact” about “women delinquents” was that they were “women who lead sexually immoral lives.”[6]
Wayward Women?
It is notoriously difficult to study inmates of institutions like Bedford. Except for chance discoveries—like letters written by inmates—written records rarely reflect the perspective of the institutionalized. However, extant sources offer a statistical profile of Davis’s charges, as well as some clues about what led them to Bedford.
Annual reports show that the typical Bedford inmate was the daughter of a working-class family beset by tragedy and poverty; fewer than half had both parents living, and surviving parents held poorly paying jobs. Prior to incarceration, the majority of inmates either contributed to the family economy or supported themselves. With little education or training, most worked as domestic servants or factory operatives. While most inmates were white, native-born women, a significant minority were not. During Davis’s tenure, up to one-fourth of Bedford’s population was foreign-born; by the end of her term, nearly one-fifth of Bedford’s inmates were African American.
Among Davis’s innovations at Bedford were her emphasis on outdoor activities and her refusal to racially segregate inmates. Both are on display in this image of gardening at Bedford, included in Ida Tarbell’s 1912 account in the American Magazine. Courtesy Vassar College Library.
Individual profiles complicate Davis’s characterization of Bedford’s inmates as sexually deviant. Some experienced sexual assault or engaged in survival sex. For instance, Davis told the story of a fourteen-year-old girl who went to meet her boyfriend for a date. When the boyfriend did not show up, she accepted another man’s invitation to go for a walk. Instead of seeing her safely home, “when it got dark, he assaulted her.” Afterward, “afraid to go home.” she exchanged sex for dinner, a hotel room, and cash before being “nabbed” by the authorities.[7]
Others were tricked into the sex trade. Tarbell recorded the tale of “Clare D.,” a motherless child who “was never properly fed, clothed, or sheltered.” After running away from her abusive stepmother, the homeless teenager accepted the seeming hospitality of some other young women. As it turned out, Clare had unknowingly taken up residence in a brothel, where the madam insisted on payment for room and board and for the “fine clothes” she had accepted as a gift.[8]
Criminality and (Im)morality
Although Bedford inmates engaged in extramarital sex for a variety of reasons—often related to their lack of resources—Davis consistently attributed her charges’ alleged crimes to personal failings rather than to financial pressures. While Davis—whose Ph.D. was in economics—astutely ascribed the demand for the sex trade to the sexual double standard, which assumed a “sex necessity” for men, she refused to acknowledge economic need as an explanation for the supply of sex workers.[9]
In 1913, Davis contributed a chapter to a book on the New York sex trade based on her evaluation of Bedford’s inmates. She concluded that the vast majority of the reformatory’s population consisted of “immoral women.”
Davis noted that women’s wages as domestic servants and factory workers were well below “the minimum on which a girl can live decently in New York City.” Despite the existence of a national movement to establish a minimum wage for working women specifically to prevent them from entering prostitution, however, she attributed women’s participation in the sex trade to immorality rather than to poverty, insisting that “there would seem to be no indication of real economic pressure as a reason for entering an immoral life.”
Davis categorized only 19 of 671 reasons given for entering the sex trade (or less than 3%) as “directly economic reasons.” However, a reexamination of Davis’s data reveals that more than half of the total reasons inmates gave were entering the sex trade were economic. (For instance, Davis classified being “turned out” as a family problem rather than a financial one.) Similarly, Davis believed parole violations resulted from “immorality,” even though the most common offense was leaving a job placement without permission.
“Bad Heredity” and “Moral Imbeciles”
Davis’s focus on morals rather than money increasingly inclined her toward eugenic explanations for criminality and immorality. In the Progressive Era, eugenic ideas about “better breeding” gained traction as a way to improve both individuals and society. Davis initially gave equal weight to heredity and environment, describing them as “hopelessly entangled.” But as she became convinced that both initial sentences and parole violations reflected her charges’ inability to conform to prevailing standards of sexual morality, she looked to the emerging field of eugenics for explanations.[10]
At the 1906 meeting of the National Prison Association, Davis spoke about female offenders, asserting that many were “moral imbeciles” who posed “a fearful menace to society.” The menace Davis had in mind was not serious crimes, but “immorality,” which Davis viewed as a worse offense than larceny.
As early as 1906, Davis warned that “bad heredity” was responsible for the problem of what she dubbed “moral imbeciles.” These young women “can not distinguish between right and wrong,” she explained, “so they become a fearful menace to society.” “Moral imbeciles,” Davis warned, “debauched” young men. Moreover, they bore children out of wedlock. Drawing on prevailing eugenic theories, Davis predicted: “If there is anything in heredity,” then “immoral” women’s “illegitimate” children were doomed “to a life of hopeless misery, such as their mothers have suffered before them.”[11]
From “Moral Imbecility” to Mental Defect
Although initially Davis acknowledged that many inmates had “good minds,” she soon linked “moral imbecility” to mental defectiveness. Beginning in 1909, Davis hired a cohort of highly educated women to assist her in testing and classifying inmates. These included Mabel Ruth Fernald, Alberta S. B. Guibord, Virginia P. Robinson, Eleanor Rowland, Edith R. Spaulding, Jessie Taft, and Clara Jean Weidensall. For this pioneering group of female physicians and psychologists, working with Davis offered unprecedented opportunities for professional advancement. As Robinson recalled: “That we brought no qualifications for working with criminal women except interest did not disturb Miss Davis, nor did it disturb us. This was our chance for vital gripping experience, and we plunged into it without a qualm and with no regrets.”
With the support of John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Bureau of Social Hygiene, Davis’s staff performed psychological evaluations and administered intelligence tests at the new Laboratory of Social Hygiene (established in 1912) and the Psychopathic Hospital (established in 1915). Image from Edith R. Spaulding’s 1923 study, with an introduction by Katharine B. Davis, An Experimental Study of Psychopathic Delinquent Women.
Davis’s staff quickly became conversant with prevailing theories of hereditary traits and the new procedures of intelligence testing. They studied with Henry Goddard, who adapted and popularized French psychologist Alfred Binet’s intelligence tests, Charles B. Davenport, an advocate of selective breeding and founder of the Eugenics Records Office, and William Healey, director of Chicago’s Juvenile Psychopathic Institute.
With the guidance of these prominent eugenicists, Davis and her colleagues undertook a series of studies of Bedford’s residents. Disregarding inmates’ low levels of formal education (approximately half had not completed grammar school), they concluded that a significant proportion of inmates had mental ages of twelve or younger. By 1913, such studies had convinced Davis that “delinquent women” included “a high percentage of mental defectives.”[12]
For her 1916 study, Mentality of the Criminal Woman, Jean Weidensall used Goddard’s version of the Binet tests, which included reading comprehension, handwriting, and telling time, to evaluate Bedford’s inmates. She found only one inmate with a “mental age” as high as twelve years old.
From Short-Term Rehabilitation to Long-Term Institutionalization
Equating “moral imbecility” with mental incapacity had profound implications. Davis believed that treatment should “fit the criminal,” not “fit the crime.” Initially, this meant that she tailored rehabilitation programs to individual needs and desires. But once Davis defined moral deviance as mental defect, she advocated that certain offenders should be confined for life, rather than serving a set sentence for a specific offense. Since she regarded intelligence as a fixed and inheritable characteristic, Davis asserted that the only “rational” solution to the “social menace” of female immorality was the permanent confinement of “feeble-minded delinquents” in custodial institutions.[13]
While undergoing physical examinations and intelligence testing, new inmates were confined to “isolation rooms.” Image from Edith R. Spaulding’s 1923 study, with an introduction by Katharine B. Davis, An Experimental Study of Psychopathic Delinquent Women.
Davis ended her career in corrections before the long-term commitment of “defective delinquents” became a reality. In the meantime, she advocated indeterminate sentences as a way to separate female offenders from the free population—and prevent their reproduction. At Bedford, all inmates served a three-year sentence with the possibility of parole. Ideally, this type of indeterminate sentence encouraged good behavior and led to early release. As Davis explained, “the prisoner should recognize that her only hope of freedom is in preparing herself to lead an industrious, self-supporting life.” But if early release was the carrot, permanent institutionalization was the stick. As Davis put it, “a genuinely indeterminate sentence has as its logical outcome the custodial care of all prisoners whom it is not possible to train to good citizenship.”[14]
“Respectable Women,” Eugenic Sterilization, and the Carceral State
In 1914, Davis left Bedford to become the first female Commissioner of Corrections for New York City, narrowly avoiding implication in a scandal about interracial, same-sex relationships that erupted at the reformatory the following year. After quelling a riot at Blackwell’s Prison, she moved on to a post on the parole board. In 1917, she joined the staff of the Bureau of Social Hygiene, which had funded much of her research at Bedford. After participating in the World War One campaign to combat prostitution and venereal diseaseI, including producing a government-sponsored film intended to discourage extramarital sex, she authored a pathbreaking study, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women (1929), in which she frankly acknowledged women’s sexual desire and documented women’s sexual activity—both heterosexual and homosexual. The resulting furor led to Davis’s early retirement, suggesting the dangers of publicly advocating a modern moral code. As a sex researcher, Davis was an important advocate for women’s sexual self-expression. But as a penal reformer, she left a more troubling legacy.
In 1914, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger sharply criticized Davis, calling her “a brilliant example of that rapidly growing group of respectable women who have discovered profitable and highly honorable careers in the exploitation of the victims of our social ‘law and order’ . . . under the name of ‘charities and corrections.’”
Whereas Ida Tarbell characterized Davis as full of “good will to women,” Margaret Sanger accused her of self-serving hypocrisy. As Sanger astutely noted, the female reformatory movement rested upon its leaders’ assumptions of “moral superiority.” Despite this clash, Davis and Sanger later collaborated in the increasingly eugenicist birth control movement. Courtesy The Woman Rebel, Model Editions Partnership.
Sanger’s critique has merit. The female reformatory movement used assumptions about women’s morality to create new professional opportunities for middle-class, educated, white, native-born women like Davis and her colleagues even as it consigned poor, uneducated, immigrant, and Black women to second-class citizenship. While Davis ended her career in corrections before her dream of confining “defective delinquents” to custodial institutions became a reality, other prison officials and medical professionals incorporated eugenics into policy, leading to the institutionalization and sterilization of thousands of “mental defectives.” Although discredited after revelations of genocide in Nazi Germany during World War Two, eugenic theories have continued to guide US policy, authorizing the medical mistreatment of African Americans, individuals with disabilities, indigenous peoples, and undocumented immigrants—and, most recently, pop star Britney Spears. Ironically, although Davis employed eugenic arguments primarily to explain the behavior of middle-class and native-born offenders—she believed that environment explained the offenses of foreign-born European immigrants and southern-born Black migrants—both the eugenic theories she espoused and the carceral system she promoted disproportionately control and punish poor, immigrant, and nonwhite people.
But exploring Davis’s career does more than expose one individual’s shortcomings. It offers insight into both women’s role in constructing the carceral state and the long-term consequences of women’s participation in the criminal justice system. Many aspects of Davis’s career in corrections—her initial enthusiasm for and her subsequent disillusionment with rehabilitation, her persistent focus on “immorality,” and her eventual turn to eugenics—reflected common trends in Progressive-Era penal reform. Thus, Davis’s career highlights how women’s prominent role in prison reform has contributed to contemporary problems. Although the female reformatory movement began as an attempt to assist unfortunate women, ultimately, women’s participation in the carceral state laid the groundwork for forced sterilization and mass incarceration.
Anya Jabour is Regents Professor of History at the University of Montana-Missoula, where she teaches U.S. women’s history and directs the public history program. The author of Sophonisba Breckinridge: Championing Women’s Activism in Modern America (University of Illinois Press, 2019), she is now working on a biography of Katharine Bement Davis. Follow her on Twitter at @anya_jabour.
Correction: A previous version of this post referred to Bedford Hills as Bedford Falls.
Further Reading
Anne E. Bowler, Chrysanthi S. Leon, and Terry G. Lilley, “‘What Shall We Do with the Young Prostitute? Reform Her or Neglect Her?’: Domestication as Reform at the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford, 1901-1913,” Journal of Social History (2013): 1-24.
Chelsea D. Chamberlain, “‘Why Wait Until They Commit a Crime?’: Moral Imbecility and the Problem of Knowledge in Progressive America, 1880-1920” (MA Thesis., University of Montana, 2015).
Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
Kathy J. Cooke, “The Limits of Heredity: Nature and Nurture in American Eugenics Before 1915,” Journal of the History of Biology 31 (Summer 1988), 263-278.
Mary Jo Deegan, “Katharine Bement Davis (1860-1935): Her Theory and Praxis of Feminist Pragmatism in Criminology,” Women and Criminal Justice, Vol. 14, No. 2-3 ((2003), 15-40.
Elizabeth Evens, “Plainsclothes Policewomen on the Trail: Undercover Investigations of Abortionists and Queer Women, 1913-1926,” Modern American History (2020): 1-18.
Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1984).
Josephine Lacy Hirsch, “Rethinking Criminal Women: The Laboratory of Social Hygiene, 1912-1918” (Senior Thesis, Barnard College, 2018).
Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Wendy Kline. Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Leah LaGrone Ochoa, “A Woman’s Worth: Wages, Race, and Respectability in 20th Century Texas” (PhD diss. Texas Christian University, 2021).
Sarah Potter, “’Undesirable Relations’: Same-Sex Relationships and the Meaning of Sexual Desire at a Women’s Reformatory during the Progressive Era,” Feminist Studies 30 (Summer 2004): 394-415.
Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Control (Routledge, 2017).
Steven Schlossman and Stephanie Wallach, “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality: Female Juvenile Delinquency in the Progressive Era,” Harvard Educational Review 48 (Feb. 1978): 65-94.
Sarah Stage, “What ‘Good Girls’ Do: Katharine Bement Davis and the Moral Panic of the First U.S. Sex Survey,” in The Moral Panics of Sexuality, ed. Breanne Fahs, Mary Dudy, and Sarah Stage (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 151-63.
Peter Tylor, “‘Denied the Power to Choose the Good: Sexuality and Mental Defect in American Medical Practice, 1850-1920,” Journal of Social History 10 (Summer 1997): 472-89.
[1] Ida M. Tarbell, “Good Will to Women,” American Magazine, Dec. 1912, 45-53, quotations 46, 50, 51.
[2] Katharine Bement Davis, “Treatment of the Female Offender,” Proceedings of the New York State Conference of Charities and Corrections (1906), 180.
[3] “Wants for Women Farm, Not Prison: At City Jailers’ Dinner Miss Davis Tells of Her Ideal Reform: Adamless Eden for Female Offenders,” New York Tribune, Feb. 2, 1915 (clipping), Katharine Bement Davis Alumnae Autobiographical Files, Vassar College Archives.
[4] Katharine Bement Davis, “Autobiographical Biography,” Part II, Chap. 1, quotations 3, 6, Pepper Family Papers, Cincinnati, Ohio. Used by permission.
[5] Katharine Bement Davis, “Prostitution,” 1919 (typed draft speech), Pepper Papers.
[6] Katharine Bement Davis, “A Plan of Rational Treatment for Women Offenders,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 4 (Sept. 1913), 402-08, quotations 403.
[7] Katharine Bement Davis, YWCA Presentation, Sept. 10, 1917, YWCA of the USA Records, Record Group 6 (Programs), Series VII (War Work & Defense Services), Subseries A (World War I Training Course Organizations), folder 9, box 711, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Many thanks to Elizabeth Evens for sharing this document.
[8] Tarbell, “Good Will,” 47.
[9] Davis, “Prostitution.”
[10] Katharine Bement Davis, “Moral Imbeciles,” Proceedings of the Annual Congress of the National Prison Association (1906), 345-50, quotation 349.
[11] Davis, “Moral Imbeciles,” 347, 348, 350.
[12] Davis, “Plan of Rational Treatment,” 404.
[13] Davis, “Plan of Rational Treatment,” 403, 408.
[14] Davis, “Plan of Rational Treatment,” 407; and Davis, “Report of Committee on Probation and Parole,” American Prison Association, [1915], Pepper Papers.
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