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

Society's idea of what constitutes a "bad girl" has changed radically, as Karen L. Zipf's study of North Carolina's Samarcand Manor demonstrates. During the period covered in her study, roughly from World War I through the 1940s, truancy, fighting, drinking, or merely running away could have landed a North Carolina white girl in the state juvenile reformatory. However, the primary offense of "inmates" was any variety of sexual delinquency, chiefly premarital sex, whether or not for money, including even victims of incest. A desire to reform any hint of sexual deviance among white girls underlay Samarcand's creation in 1917. So intent on its mission of maintaining proper white womanhood, the state abandoned due process and civil liberties. Girls arrested and charged (but not tried and convicted) in juvenile court could be committed by a majority vote of a five-person board of managers, to serve up to three years, with discharge granted not by a court but by that board. Disciplinary measures at the reformatory were so harsh that it is hard not to conclude that being sentenced to Samarcand constituted being sentenced to child abuse. At last, in 1931, the girls' misery led to arson as over a dozen residents set fires that destroyed two dormitories at the institution.

Zipf skillfully traces views of sexuality and purity, the workings of the juvenile justice system, and conflicting ideas held by clubwomen, social workers, and government officials about the possibilities of reforming "bad girls." After recounting the arson trial and the disastrous strategy of the girls' defense attorney—who shifted her focus from the state's failure to serve its Samarcand inmates wisely or well to a defense that characterized the girls as "clinically feebleminded"—Zipf addresses shocking policy changes underpinned by the "science" of eugenics, which eventually led to the sterilization of 293 Samarcand girls over a period of two decades (p. 2).

Zipf has made impressive use of state records as well as manuscript sources and newspapers to construct a fascinating narrative. However, her assertion that racial motives underlay policy decisions seems an unwarranted reliance on the trope of whiteness. Samarcand girls were disadvantaged in many ways, hailing from neglectful or dysfunctional families, often turning early to sex in search of love, often abused, and often infected with venereal diseases. They were far from "pure"; in the parlance of the times, they were "fallen" (p. 7). Zipf posits that the horror of "interracial sexual liaisons" motivated the state to intervene in their lives "to save the white stock" (p. 73). Was sex across the color line a problem? In 191 pages of text, replete with case history details, Zipf provides but one instance of interracial sex, noting that a white North Carolina girl "bore four illegitimate children, 'one of which … was a mulatto'" (p. 82). She alleges that Kate Burr Johnson, the state commissioner of public welfare, aimed to have Samarcand "preserve the natural superiority and purity of the white race," but Zipf provides no evidence (such as quotations from Johnson's papers, for example) to support the assertion that concerns about race motivated Johnson (pp. 85–86). Were considerations of whiteness actually at the heart of Samarcand's mission? Did the state really see these delinquents as not white and thus "treated this class as another race" (p. 161; emphasis added)? Peter Kolchin sagely cautions our profession against "overreliance on whiteness in explaining the American past," rightly noting that "Americans have had many ways of looking down on people without questioning their whiteness" ("Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America," Journal of American History, 89 [June 2002], 157, 165). One doubts that even the "bad girls at Samarcand" lost their white privilege completely in pre—World War II North Carolina.