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

In Bad Girls at Samarcand, associate professor of history Karin L. Zipf tells the story of young women incarcerated at the State Home and Industrial School for Girls in North Carolina, known popularly as Samarcand Manor. The book is divided into eight chapters, with a brief introduction and epilogue. The author uses institutional records, court documents, newspaper accounts, and other sources to situate life at Samarcand in a broader context of juvenile justice and reform.

In chapter 1 Zipf details the ideologies and policies governing the creation of the school through an examination of the politics of Hope Summerell Chamberlain and Kate Burr Johnson, two women involved with the North Carolina Federation of Women's Clubs and with the creation of key legislation in North Carolina in the wake of World War I. In Zipf's rendering, the two women come to embody competing notions of southern white womanhood in the early twentieth century, with Chamberlain more interested in protecting and redeeming "fallen women" who had "succumbed to seduction" and Johnson wanting to "isolate and curb undesirable traits, such as promiscuity, that appeared in the most mentally defective white girls" while also striving "to prevent the spread of those traits in the white race" (16). These tensions would continue to influence life at Samarcand throughout the interwar period.

Chapter 2 focuses on institutional funding. In an effort to secure federal funding for Samarcand through the Chamberlain-Kahn Act (1918), which was designed to distribute funds to states "for the purpose of controlling the spread of venereal disease" (30), officials in North Carolina linked girls' and young women's deviant behavior "to prostitution and disease," an origin story that, Zipf notes, "served as the seed of stigma that beset Samarcand Manor and its residents for the next twenty years" (43). In chapter 3 Zipf relies primarily on institutional records and newspaper reports to narrativize the organizational philosophies and daily routines at Samarcand Manor. Chapter 4, which focuses largely on Kate Burr Johnson, who served as North Carolina's commissioner of charities and public welfare from 1921 through 1930, explores the influence of eugenic thinking on both Johnson and life at Samarcand Manor. Johnson's approach to reform was shaped by eugenics, by progressivism, and by more traditional notions of southern white womanhood. This "interplay of culture and biology reflected a movement particular to southern intellectuals in the era of eugenics," Zipf argues (67). The result, according to Zipf, was a neo-Lamarckian approach to reform that gave nearly equal weight to environmental and cultural factors, as well as those that had a more direct link to heredity and reproduction, such as sterilization.

In chapter 5 Zipf analyzes the ways in which three cultural icons of jazz age America—the southern lady, the new woman, and the flapper—worked together both to constrain and to define young women's behavior. Zipf argues that officials at the school believed that runaways, for example, some of whom were fleeing familial sexual abuse, "did not possess any of the traits of the obedient southern lady, the confident new woman, or the buoyant flapper. They were social misfits who required psychiatry and, in the case of intense family conflict, institutionalization" (97). Other inmates were more influenced by the notion of the "cotton mill girls," young women who defied southern social norms by working for wages and participating in labor activism (103). Chapter 6 focuses on Nell Battle Lewis, a popular columnist for the News and Observer and the attorney who defended the fourteen young women charged with arson after Chamberlain and Bickett Halls burned at Samarcand Manor in March 1931. According to Zipf, Lewis characterized the defendants as "wayward adolescents, budding into womanhood but neglected by the state" (108). Lewis described the girls as "feebleminded" and "victims of their environment" (108). Although North Carolina had not historically sentenced women...