Policing Sex in the Sunflower State: The Story of the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women by Nicole Perry

Abstract

Studying the history of girls’ and women’s imprisonment is a vital but often neglected area of feminist criminology. A proper understanding of the current patterns, practices, and challenges of female incarceration requires placing these issues in their historical context, as Perry does in this important book. In the tradition of Nicole Hahn Rafter’s Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Control (Piscataway, New Jersey, 1990), Perry’s historical work clearly illustrates the necessity of exploring girls’ and women’s imprisonment as central to the enforcement of male privilege.How exactly did the nation, and the state of Kansas, decide that incarceration was the proper response to venereal disease? At the start of World War I, military officials were concerned about soldiers contracting syphilis and gonorrhea. Although many options were considered, including the distribution of condoms or the regulation of prostitution, the military ultimately adopted a two-part plan that included “moral training” for the men and “imprison[ment]” for women “suspected of spreading venereal disease” (2). The impact was immediate. Kansas, like many other states, passed legislation embracing this approach; the gendered enforcement is evident in the data. “By March 1919, the state had detained 410 women … but only 44 men” (2). Ultimately, nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of all the women in the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women (ksifa) between 1918 and 1942 were there because they had contracted venereal disease (3). Nor was this pattern restricted to Kansas. As Perry notes, “[n]ationally, there were more than eighteen thousand women quarantined for venereal disease during the war” (2). That said, she states that decades later, this story is “largely untold” (3).Perry details the ways in which Kansas sidestepped women’s legal rights. First and foremost, it passed a regulation (Chapter 205) that “allotted the board of health broad powers to make rules regarding health policies in the state, including the right to quarantine people considered a risk of spreading disease” (25). Perry also makes clear that although some girls and women in these prison populations had engaged in prostitution, “others were clearly the victims of men’s vices caught up in a legal system that punished women for venereal disease but not men” (184). This injustice was made easier by the fact that the vast majority of these women, at least in Kansas, had impoverished backgrounds and belonged to minority groups. As an example, African-American women comprised nearly one-fifth (19 percent) of the population of ksifw but only about 4 percent of the state’s entire population; Irish women were also a substantial proportion of the whites (40–41).The question of how these health systems discovered girls and women who had the disease takes the story on a decidedly familiar path. Most of the young women incarcerated at ksifw were between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four, many of them considered “delinquent” girls whose parents had referred them to the “farm” to curb their sexual activity. Other young women owed their incarceration to abusive boyfriends and husbands; indeed, more than half of this group (56 percent) was married, an unusually high marital rate for this age group. According to Perry, only 38 percent of girls and women their age in Kansas were married (182). An individual who gave a woman’s or girl’s name to a health officer could cause her to be detained by police and “subjected to medical testing” (154).Women’s confinement at the Farm was indefinite; doctors and superintendents decided when they were sufficiently cured physically and morally to re-enter society. In practice, however, women detained under Chapter 205 spent an average of four months at the Farm. While there, inmates received treatment for their diseases (none of which were particularly effective). They were also subjected to a “moral education” focused on hard work and norms for proper feminine behavior, as inculcated, ironically, by middle-class women whose successful struggle to achieve the vote, made them eager to seek “women’s work for women” (73). Not only did first-wave feminists support the creation of institutions like ksifw, but the next generation of women leaders actually sought employment in such facilities, becoming, in Freedman’s words, “their sister’s keepers.”1Perry’s work is a carefully detailed case study that calls out for similar historical research in other states (and countries). It reminds us that much of the effort to police girls’ and women’s lives, whenever it occurs, fundamentally aims to punish and stigmatize them for sexual activity, while systematically ignoring the same behavior in men.