Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890–1960 by Michael A. Rembis (review)

In Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890–1960, Michael Rembis has undertaken a unique historical study of juvenile delinquency as it has been applied to young women in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using case files and documents from the State Training School in Geneva, Illinois, Rembis traces the influence of eugenic thought on policies resulting in the involuntary incarceration of thousands of girls deemed “feebleminded” or “mentally defective.”

Framing the six-chapter volume as a “disability history” focused on the “social construction of impairment,” Rembis links the phenomenon of “nation rebuilding” to the discourse of disablement and “popular perceptions and scientific definitions of mental and psychological ‘defect’” (p. 4). In his exclusive focus on female adolescents, he highlights the ways in which gender and class are implicated in eugenic segregation in Illinois in particular and explores the roles played by maternalist reformers and women professionals in promoting it as a solution to social problems such as sex delinquency.

Segregating the “feebleminded” indefinitely from the general population through institutionalization became possible in Illinois after the 1915 passage of the state involuntary commitment law and did not end until the 1950s. For young girls, the diagnosis of feeblemindedness was typically connected to “sex delinquency” and behavior that deviated from middle-class social norms. As a scholar situated in disability studies, Rembis is less interested in the scientific “truth” of mental defect than in the discursive construction of the identities of those categorized as “feebleminded.” He describes the task of Defining Deviance as twofold: “to engage simultaneously in a sustained analysis . . . of the formation of power/knowledge systems of ‘impairment’” and “to retrieve and recount . . . the lives and experiences of the young women themselves” (p. 8).

Although Rembis has convincingly established an account of the larger social and political context in which these young women were incarcerated, it is far more difficult to reconstruct and interpret the perspectives of the girls themselves in relation to their diagnoses and incarceration, primarily because their own voices only emerge through court records, mental evaluations, and medical records. Perhaps most disturbing is that what so often emerges in the case studies is a pattern of classifying victims of rape and sexual abuse as mentally defective. Rembis notes the association of female sexual delinquency in particular with “a perceived lack of mental capacity,” but Defining Deviance could go even further in providing a feminist analysis of this trend, particularly in differentiating sexual abuse and assault from sex delinquency.

Nevertheless, the book is an important contribution to the understanding of eugenic segregation and particularly the role that women reformers and professionals played in establishing “feeblemindedness” as grounds for the incarceration of a vulnerable population. The first three chapters of the book trace the influence of eugenic thought in the popular culture of early twentieth-century America and its contribution to conceptions of mental health and the juvenile justice system. Despite changing views on the origins of delinquency and the relationship between biology and social misconduct, Rembis demonstrates that the number of Illinois residents institutionalized continued to rise after the First World War, and again after World War II, and that “young women remained especially vulnerable to commitment” (p. 71). This gender distinction can in part be traced to the US Army’s IQ testing during WWI which scored a substantial number of recruits only slightly above “high grade morons”—results that encouraged a distinction between “good” and “bad” feeblemindedness, categories which correlated with highly gendered ideas about proper sexual behavior.

In the remaining three chapters, Rembis returns to the case files of girls incarcerated at Geneva, giving the reader a unique glimpse into the psychological evaluation of inmates. Using the ritual of examination as his primary site of study, Rembis employs Foucauldian analysis to locate resistance to the diagnosis of impairment in both the affect and verbal responses of the girls as recorded by examiners...