venereal disease and the construction of women's respectability in early 20th century

349 Pages·2015·4.93 MB·English

by  Zack Casey

DISEASED BODIES AND RUINED REPUTATIONS: VENEREAL DISEASE AND THE
CONSTRUCTION OF WOMEN’S RESPECTABILITY IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY
KANSAS
By
Nicole Perry

Submitted to the graduate degree program in Sociology and the Graduate Faculty of the
University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.

________________________________
Chairperson Brian Donovan
________________________________
Kelly Chong
________________________________
Joane Nagel
________________________________
William Staples
________________________________
Catherine Batza

Date Defended: December 4, 2015
ii

The Dissertation Committee for Nicole Perry
certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

DISEASED BODIES AND RUINED REPUTATIONS: VENEREAL DISEASE AND THE
CONSTRUCTION OF WOMEN’S RESPECTABILITY IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY
KANSAS

________________________________
Chairperson Brian Donovan

Date approved: December 4, 2015
iii

Abstract
In 1917, the state of Kansas passed a state quarantine law, Chapter 205, which allowed
authorities to detain people with venereal disease. The law was enforced along lines of gender,
race, and class, with poor women being imprisoned at the Women’s Industrial Farm (WIF) in
Lansing, Kansas throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The WIF thus served as an institution of
social control, imprisoning women whose sexual behaviors violated social norms. This research
examines three groups of women’s involvement with this institution: the elite activist women
who lobbied to create the Farm, the professional women who ran the institution, and the inmates
detained under Chapter 205. By comparing these groups of women’s relationship to the Farm,
this research explores the intersection of class, sexuality, gender, race, and respectability in their
respective social positions. Contributing to the literature on the intersection of class and
sexuality, this research highlights the importance of respectability for all three groups of women
and the barriers between each group of women and a respectable status. Social inequalities and
privileges informed how respectability functioned at the Farm, allowing the activist and
professional women to construct themselves as being respectable through their involvement with
the WIF at the same time that they constructed the imprisoned women as being disreputable.
These different groups of women’s involvement with the Farm deepened social boundaries
between groups along existing social hierarchies. This attention to the role of respectability in
constructing boundaries is key to understanding inequality and a reminder of the larger cultural
work that is accomplished through institutions of social control and discussions of the criminality
of groups of people.
iv

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the many people who helped me shape this research and supported
me personally while I worked on it. First, a huge thanks to my advisor, Brian Donovan. You
saw some glimmer of hope in those first awful papers I turned in in graduate school, and have
read countless drafts of papers and dissertation chapters over the last few years. Your supportive
attitude and positive feedback have been instrumental to me completing this project. Thanks also
to my other committee members, Bill Staples, Joane Nagel, Kelly Chong, and Katie Batza, as
well as Ann Schofield: your input on this project has been extremely helpful and have helped
improve the project tremendously. I would also like to thank my coworkers, John Augusto and
Dyan Morgan, for their flexibility and support while I completed my dissertation. I know that
my taking time off of work to get this done was not always convenient or easy for you, and I
cannot express enough appreciation that you not only picked up the slack, but were enthusiastic
and supportive of my goals.
I could not have completed this work without the support of my friends and family. To
Holly: thanks for serving as my unofficial medical consultant for this project and being
genuinely excited when I asked about advanced-stage syphilis. To my parents and other family:
you have assisted my family in so many ways as I have worked my way through graduate school.
I cannot thank you enough; this would have been so much harder and less fun without you. To
Max and Oliver: thanks for providing the comic relief and sense of perspective needed in life.
And, finally, for Zack: you have supported me through this whole process with a sense of humor,
a supportive attitude, and a willingness to make sacrifices even when you did not have much left
to give. Thank you—this would not have been possible without you.
v

Table of Contents
CH 1: Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1
Defining Boundaries through Respectability .............................................................................. 4
Chapter Outline ......................................................................................................................... 16
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 19
CH 2: Methods .............................................................................................................................. 22
Approach to Sources ................................................................................................................. 24
Sources for History Chapter ...................................................................................................... 26
Sources for Activist Women’s Chapter ..................................................................................... 27
Sources for Professional Women’s Chapter .............................................................................. 28
Sources for Imprisoned Women’s Chapter ............................................................................... 30
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 35
CH 3: World War I, Sexuality, and Venereal Disease Control in Kansas ..................................... 36
Changes in Sexual Culture ........................................................................................................ 37
The Origins the Social Hygiene Movement.............................................................................. 41
WWI and the Fight against Venereal Disease ........................................................................... 47
The Transition to a Peacetime Venereal Disease Control Policy .............................................. 68
Life at the Women’s Industrial Farm, 1919-1942 ..................................................................... 74
Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................113
CH 4: “Anything to Please the Ladies”: the Activist Women who Founded the WIF.................114
Winning the Vote: Women’s Suffrage & Political Self-Governance (1861-1912) ..................117
Creating the Women’s Industrial Farm (1912-1917) .............................................................. 126
Social Hygiene (1919-1942) ................................................................................................... 141
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 155
CH 5: Training Inmates for Respectability: The Professional Women of the WIF .................... 158
The Women’s Industrial Farm as Part of the National Women’s Reformatory Movement .... 160
The Superintendents of the WIF ............................................................................................. 182
The Matrons and Officers of the WIF ..................................................................................... 193
The Benefits and Constraints of Working at the WIF ............................................................. 197
Identity, Competing Demands, and the Philosophy of Reform at the WIF ............................ 197
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 233
CH 6: Staking a Claim to Respectability: the Inmate Interviews of the Women’s Industrial Farm
..................................................................................................................................................... 235
Paths to the Women’s Industrial Farm .................................................................................... 237
vi

Staking Claims to Respectability ............................................................................................ 275
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 307
CH 7: Conclusion .........................................................................................................................311
Sexuality and Venereal Disease during WWII .........................................................................311
Lessons from the Women’s Industrial Farm ........................................................................... 313
Respectability and the Women of the WIF ............................................................................. 315
Symbolic & Social Boundaries—What Have We Learned by Exploring Respectability? ..... 324
Women’s Imprisonment and Respectability Today ................................................................ 326
References ................................................................................................................................... 333
1

CH 1: Introduction

In December of 1925, 16-year-old Grace Smith1 was admitted as inmate number 2045 at
the Women’s Industrial Farm in Lansing, Kansas. She described how she came to be there:
“Mrs. Bay, Police Matron came to the place where I was staying, [the home of] W. T. Reynolds,
and said that his daughter Nancy Wright and myself had been reported for having disease.
Nancy's sister Blanch took us up for examination and I was sent here.” She went on to explain:
“I have never been with but two men [since] I left my husband […] I have never got money from
either of them we just went out on parties. My mother never knew until I was sent here that I
wasn't a virtuous girl” (Inmate 2045;1925). Grace had been convicted for a violation of Chapter
205, a Kansas state law that allowed for the quarantine of those diagnosed with sexually
transmitted diseases. It was part of a wave of legislation passed during the Progressive Era
(1880-1920) and WWI that ushered in a heightened state of surveillance over the nation's sex life
(Luker 1998). The Women's Industrial Farm (WIF) served as a regulating institution for
women's sexuality in Kansas throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
The Women's Industrial Farm was founded as a regular women’s reformatory in 1917,
yet it quickly was inundated with women arrested under the state quarantine law as part of the
nationwide response to the problem of venereal disease in the armed forces during WWI.
Military officials considered several options to control syphilis and gonorrhea in the population
of soldiers, including maintaining a regulated system of prostitution and providing condoms to
soldiers, yet they settled on a two-part plan: provide moral training for the soldiers through the

1 Names of inmates at the WIF are pseudonyms.
2

newly created Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) and imprison women that were
suspected of spreading disease to soldiers (Clement 2006:115-117). Nationally, over 18,000
women suspected of having venereal diseases were quarantined in federally-funded facilities
during the war (Luker 1998:622); research conducted under the U.S. Interdepartmental Social
Hygiene Board found that most of the women detained were working class and that 41% were
unemployed at the time of arrest (Brandt 1985:90-91). The Kansas legislature passed Chapter
205 in 1917 in response to these national developments, receiving federal political and financial
backing.2 Though Chapter 205 was officially gender-neutral, it was primarily used against
women, particularly as it transitioned from a wartime policy to a peacetime public health
strategy. Women were “quarantined” alongside regular female prisoners at the WIF throughout
the 1920s and 1930s, with women convicted under Chapter 205 averaging 71% of the total
inmate population between 1918 and 1942. Their confinement at the WIF was indefinite, with
doctors and superintendents deciding when they were physically and morally “cured” enough to
reenter society; in practice, women detained under Chapter 205 spent, on average, around four
months at the WIF during this period. While at the WIF, inmates received treatment for their
diseases and were subjected to a plan of moral reform focusing on the value of hard work and the
inculcation of middle class norms for proper feminine behavior. Though the numbers of women
imprisoned under Chapter 205 declined in the 1940s, women were quarantined under the law as
late as 1956. Altogether, 5,331 were detained at the WIF under Chapter 205 between the years of
1918-1942.3
It is within this general context that Grace Smith came to be imprisoned at the Women's

2 As part of the $427,000 that the federal government spent nationally, the hospital at the WIF was built in 1920
with matching funds from the state and federal government (Frazier 1988:5).
3 All data about the inmates of the Farm come from WIF Biennial reports between 1918 and 1942.
3

Industrial Farm in 1925. However, Grace's case is not simply a story of state control of
sexuality; it is also a story of social class, gender, and respectability. Grace's status as a working-
class girl placed her sexuality in the spotlight, both as a target of government control and of
discourses about proper female sexuality. Behind the official state policies, there were different
groups of women with distinct relationships to the regulation of working-class women's
sexuality: elite clubwomen who lobbied for the creation of humane women's prisons and rallied
to reform the morality of the nation, middle-class professional women who found employment in
the burgeoning new field of social work, and, of course, the working-class women whose
families, social lives, and bodies came under the close scrutiny of the state.
This research examines how the state's regulation of working-class women's sexuality
contributed to the maintenance of class boundaries. Recent calls for research into the
intersection of class and sexuality highlight the need for theories and concepts that allow
researchers to analyze the material and cultural dimensions of class while interrogating the role
of sexuality (Taylor 2011). The literature on boundary work provides one such avenue for
studying the intersection of class and sexuality, as narratives about sexuality serve as a powerful
tool for drawing and maintaining boundaries around social groups by assigning moral value to
“us” and “them” (Lamont and Molnar 2002; Nagel 2003). While research demonstrates that
people use sexuality in various ways to construct and maintain symbolic boundaries (Beisel
1997; Collins 2004; Nagel 2003), the exact mechanisms through which this occurs remains in
need of further study. I argue that the pursuit of respectability is a driving force behind the
maintenance of class boundaries through discussions of sexuality (Skeggs 1997, 2005). A focus
on respectability highlights the relational character of social class, as working-class women
become the reference group against which others judge their own respectability. This project
4

will examine how women at different social class levels engaged in discourses of respectability
through their involvement with the WIF and Chapter 205.
These struggles over in-group and out-group identity are particularly visible in times of
drastic social changes, such as the huge shifts in dating and sexual behaviors that took place
during the sensuous Jazz Age of the 1920s and the hard financial times of the 1930s. As divorce,
love-based marriages, and premarital sexual intimacy became more common among young
people, politicians, reformers, and a generation of worried parents publicly lamented the crisis in
the nation's sexual morality. Central to their discussions was the sexuality of young working-
class women. This research will contribute to the historical record by giving voice to the
working-class women most affected by state control of sexuality, a voice that is all too often lost
in the historical record. It will also follow up on the rich literature about sexuality in the
Progressive Era (Blair 2010; Clement 2006; Donovan 2005; Odem 1995; Rosen 1982; Strange
1995) to see how the legacy of state regulation of sexuality was experienced by women in the
1920s and 1930s. The Midwestern focus of this research will provide a much needed counterpart
to the research on the history of sexuality, which mainly focuses on major cities on the coasts to
the peril of understanding how changes in sexual culture are experienced by everyday Americans
(Bailey 1999:4). Understanding state regulation of sexuality during this period will not only
provide a window into the relationship between class boundaries, respectability, and sexuality, it
will fill gaps in the historical record about working-class women’s sexual experiences.

Defining Boundaries through Respectability
Sexuality and Social Control
Following the initial insights of Humphreys (1970) and Gagnon and Simon (1973),
sociologists see sexuality as being socially constructed, meaning that the practices, relationships,