Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory by Karin L. Zipf (review)

North Carolina’s sterilization program became national news in 2010 when the legislature voted to offer reparations to victims of the state’s eugenic sterilization program. In 2014, the state began making payments of $20,000 each to qualifying individuals, the majority of whom were sterilized in the post–World War II era. Scholars, journalists, and politicians have dissected North Carolina’s postwar sterilization program, focusing in particular on its efforts to reduce welfare costs by rendering poor black women infertile. Karin Zipf, however, starts her story of sterilization and eugenics in the state earlier, in the late 1910s, when Victorian-era reformers successfully pressed state legislators to establish institutions for “fallen” girls, who they believed could be redeemed through state intervention. Of course, in the era of Jim Crow, the opportunity for redemption existed only for white women; reformers did not invest in “wayward” black girls whom they deemed unworthy of public support. The North Carolina legislature created Samarcand Manor in 1917 to rehabilitate white adolescent girls, a process steeped in white supremacy. Reformers believed that all white girls embodied southern womanhood, even if they had strayed from its central tenets of piety and gentility. The state invested in the rehabilitation and training of white women regardless of background as part of its efforts to ensure white dominance.

In 1931, a fire set by residents at Samarcand destroyed two buildings on the property and led to the arrest of sixteen girls for the crime of arson, then a death penalty offense in North Carolina. Their trial proved a catalyst for major changes in North Carolina’s handling of delinquent white girls as it intersected with the rise of eugenics and the influence of mental hygienists—social workers who embraced and practiced eugenics. In the wake of the trial, which concluded with the judge sentencing twelve of the girls to five years in prison (they served only one), mental hygienists assumed control of Samarcand and other state institutions. Applying “scientific” techniques to juvenile reform, they implemented a classification system based upon eugenic constructs and measured by IQ tests. Using IQ scores, inmates’ sexual history, and the presence or absence of venereal disease (believed to be a symptom of lack of reproductive fitness), mental hygienists diagnosed, treated, and paroled inmates in an orderly, “scientific” manner. Institutional policy encouraged sterilization for all girls with IQ scores of sixty-five and below upon release; between 1929 and 1950, nearly three hundred Samarcand residents underwent sterilization (131). Like Victorian reformers, mental hygienists continued to infuse their approach to juvenile reform with white supremacy, but unlike their predecessors, who believed all white girls embodied the possibility of reform, “modern” reformers believed many girls were genetically unable to be reformed and as such, the state held a responsibility to control their reproduction in order to preserve white supremacy. Poor, “unfit” girls could drag down the white race, diluting its bloodlines and causing social instability unless their “destructive” behavior could be neutralized. Sterilization offered a solution to this problem, and while the North Carolina reformers who assumed control of Samarcand ended the practice of indefinite sentences and vicious whippings, they replaced these methods of control with a surgical one that had an equally destructive effect on the lives of its victims.

Zipf is an expert storyteller and a first-rate scholar. She creatively employs a range of sources to tell the story of juvenile reform and eugenics in North Carolina before 1950 and presents humane, complicated profiles of the main actors in her narrative. Zipf is equally attentive to reformers, politicians, judges, and inmates. She spends a chapter recounting horrible stories of abuse towards Samarcand residents under the leadership of superintendent Agnes MacNaughton, but reminds the reader that MacNaughton remained Victorian in her approach to juvenile reform, always believing in the ability of her charges to change. In another chapter...