Evidence of V

by Sheila O'Connor

  We’d come in search of my mother’s story—her adoption, her biological parents, her conception, her birth—with the belief that her lost story might help us make sense of a lifetime of shared familial traumas. What we found instead were more mysteries to solve. Her young mother’s shocking six-year sentence at fifteen. For what? For pregnancy? My mother housed at the institution as an infant to be breast-fed for three months, then taken from her mother? My maternal grandmother finally paroled at eighteen, but what exactly did parole consist of, and why did she subsequently escape parole? Were these troubling discoveries unique to our family, or were other Minnesota girls also victims of this system? And was it only Minnesota? What characterized an “immoral” or “incorrigible” girl in 1935? What made incorrigibility a crime?

  Throughout the next decade, I attempted to answer those early questions with additional research. I studied texts and academic articles on the history of female incarceration, the criminalization of female sexuality, the national practice of incarcerating girls for immorality, or girls merely “in danger of becoming immoral.” I pursued my suspicion that many of these girls were likely victims of physical or sexual abuse prior to their commitments, and quickly had that hunch confirmed. I read about the history of case records and the professionalization of social work, the creation of juvenile incarceration facilities across America, the Progressive Era, and the Minnesota law that required unmarried women to breastfeed. I researched Minneapolis’ history of antisemitism, particularly virulent during the Depression. I immersed myself in 1930s Minneapolis and the rise of the nightclub culture that followed the end of Prohibition. I walked the Minneapolis streets named in that file, believing somehow this gathering of pieces, this immersion into history, would deliver the story of the lost teenage girl, the story my mother longed for when we first opened her file.

  And then, more than ten years after the day we saw my mother’s file, I requested a fragile, worn book through interlibrary loan at Hamline University where I am a professor in the Creative Writing Program. That invaluable book, Handbook of American Institutions for Juvenile Delinquents, First Edition, Volume I, West North Central States, 1938— published by the Osborne Association, Inc., an organization committed to working with incarcerated men, women, and children, and the families affected by incarceration—was the first in what was to be a nationwide study of institutions for incarcerated juveniles across the United States. It was there, in their carefully documented report, that I began to understand the harsh realities facing the inmates at the Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre during the time of my mother’s birth, as well as the troubling experiences of incarcerated girls in reformatories in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Reading and rereading the details of that report, I began to imagine my mother’s early infancy, and her young mother’s difficult days during those interminable years until parole. I learned of the weeks of isolation she would have endured upon arrival, the initial strip search, the school’s attempt to separate each girl from all she’d known. I could envision her initial placement at Fairview Colony, a special cluster of cottages for the pregnant and “feeble-minded,” and later, her relocation to the main grounds once her baby girl was taken from the school. I learned about the rigor of their schedules, the expectations for daily labor, the cottage system designed to segregate and separate the girls, the corporal punishments of tubbings, isolation, and slaps. And on nearly every page, there was the emphasis on the successful completion of domestic training expected of each girl. In addition to this book, I was aided by the chapter on the 1930s in A History of the Minnesota Home School 1911–1976, a report written by Joan McDonald. Finally, the speech of the first Sauk Centre superintendent, Fannie French Morse (1866–1944)—which I have excerpted on pages 76 and 77—provided invaluable perspective on the ethos of this institution where Minnesota girls were held.

  The Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre, as well as the other institutions featured in the first Osborne Association report, are representative of an extensive network of girls reformatories that spanned the United States in 1938. The push to create reformatories for adolescent girls was well underway in the early part of the twentieth century. Organized primarily by Progressive Era women to reform a criminal justice system focused on the needs and crimes of men, in part this effort aimed to advance a female-centric, women-administered system designed to rehabilitate and protect adolescent girls. The complex factors, biases, and religious overtones influencing this movement are many, as are the motives of reformers, but when my maternal grandmother entered the justice system in 1935, as one of thousands across America, there were institutions ready to house her and countless other “immoral” girls.

  According to, Juvenile Delinquents in Public Institutions, 1933, prepared by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Bureau of the Census, girls as young as six were committed to reform institutions in nearly every state. The primary offenses documented for these girls were “sex offenses; immorality and sex delinquency; in danger of leading immoral life; running away; incorrigibility; delinquency.” Although these minor status offenses—acts that would not be prosecuted if committed by an adult—were not considered crimes, they nevertheless resulted in commitments until the age of twenty-one for girls in Minnesota. In some states, committed girls and boys shared an institution; in many others, separate institutions were created for the girls. In the 1930s, many of the institutions were racially segregated, either within a shared institution or existing as separate facilities where girls of color were subjected to racial violence. (For a study that examines the historical treatment of African American girls committed as delinquent in Missouri, see Leroy M. Rowe’s “A Grave Injustice: Institutional Terror at the State Industrial Home for Negro Girls and the Paradox of Juvenile Delinquent Reform in Missouri, 1888–1960.”) Each institution has its own troubling history, a history that spans much of the twentieth century. While some trends in the field of juvenile justice have changed throughout the decades, as late as 1989, when Sauk Centre closed, it was still in use as a detention facility for girls.

  Any ambitious researcher looking for a history of abuse within these institutions will likely find it, but the stories we are missing as a nation are the personal narratives of the thousands of girls held for years within those institutions for nothing more than “immorality” or similar non-criminal offenses, the girls victimized within those institutions and in strangers’ homes while on parole. The damage done to those sentenced, silenced girls and their descendants is impossible to quantify. Although many of us may be familiar with the practice of institutionalizing “problem” girls in other countries, including the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, few of us are aware of what happened in America. Shamed by social stigma, dismissed as “bad girls,” released to poor employment prospects, or on the run for years as fugitives, few of these girls made their stories known. Even the esteemed performer Ella Fitzgerald, another young aspiring singer and dancer, did not speak of her time at the New York Training School for Girls in 1933, where she was committed as “ungovernable” and subjected to physical abuse.

  Unfortunately, the issues girls confront in the juvenile justice system remain distressingly relevant today. According to “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story,” published in 2015 by Rights4girls, Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, and the Ms. Foundation, “the leading cause of arrest for girls are minor offenses such as misdemeanors, status offenses, outstanding warrants, and technical violations. And the decision to arrest and detain girls in these cases has been shown often to be based in part on the perception of girls having violated conventional norms and stereotypes of feminine behavior.” Additionally, girls within the juvenile justice system include a disproportionate number of girls of color, LGBTQ+, and gender nonconforming youth. And while a significant number of girls within the system have been victimized by violence, mental health treatment within resident
ial detention facilities remains inadequate.

  More than eighty years beyond my maternal grandmother’s incarceration, girls within our current juvenile justice system continue to be violated by strip searches, seclusion, restraints, lack of body privacy, staff mistreatment, and reported incidents of physical and sexual assault. If we hope for meaningful reform within our juvenile justice system, the stories of incarcerated girls, past and present, as well as their descendants, must be heard.

  My decision to write this book as an assemblage of fragmented documents and fiction was based on my realization that the truth of my maternal grandmother and her incarceration can’t be fully known. Her story, existing in the white space of her absence, is a mystery that my family and I will occupy forever. The facts, the figures, and the observations of the experts included in this book establish the milieu of her time and place, its morals and injustices. It’s a world I entered deeply, both imaginatively and intellectually, in search of a veracity I couldn’t trust the alleged facts alone to tell.

  This book has been an act of inquiry: a decades-long effort to recover the fifteen-year-old dancer and her daughter, my mother, and to consider the consequences of law and history and the ways in which our past, both known and unknown, informs our present. Perhaps most importantly, I am seeking to fill the void with story, to tell myself a tale that will make sense of what I’ve lost.

  I close this book still listening and learning, waiting to hear the stories of survivors and descendants, to be a part of the future research and conversations I hope this work invites.

  Bibliography

  WORKS CITED

  Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. Roberts Bros., 1869.

  “Beautiful Delores Multiple Heartbreak Ended in a Broadway Tragedy.” Minneapolis Tribune, 16 Feb. 1936.

  Bigelow, Maurice A. Sex-Education: A Series of Lectures Concerning Knowledge of Sex in Its Relation to Human Life. Macmillan, 1916.

  “Broken Homes Main Cause of Child Failure.” St. Cloud Daily Times and Daily Journal-Press, 4 May 1937.

  Cox, William B., and F. Lovell Bixby, editors. Handbook of American Institutions for Delinquent Juveniles, Vol. 1: West North Central States, 1938. New York: Osborne Assoc., 1938.

  Lundberg, Emma O. Children of Illegitimate Birth and Measures for Their Protection. Bureau Publication No. 166. United States, Dept. of Labor, Children’s Bureau, Government Printing Office, 1926.

  Lunden, Walter A. Juvenile Delinquency: Manual and Source Book. U of Pittsburgh, 1936.

  Mason’s Minnesota Statutes 1927. Compiled and edited by the editorial staff of the Citer-Digest Company, St. Paul, 1927.

  1936 Supplement to Mason’s Minnesota Statutes, 1927. St. Paul: Citer-Digest Co., 1936.

  Milosz, Czeslaw. Bells in Winter. Ecco, 1988.

  New Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language. Encyclopedic Edition with a Library of Useful Knowledge. DeLair, 1980.

  Proceedings of the First State Conference of Child Welfare Boards with the Board of Control, State Capitol, May 9 and 10, 1919, St. Paul, Minnesota.

  “Report of Population for Month Ending November 30, 1935.” Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre, Case files, Minnesota Historical Society.

  “Report to the Minnesota State Board of Control.” June 30, 1936. Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre, Case files, Minnesota Historical Society.

  “Report to the Minnesota State Board of Control.” June 30, 1938. Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre, Case files, Minnesota Historical Society.

  Sadler, William S., and Lena K. Sadler. The Mother and Her Child. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1916.

  “School Days and Night Life Mix.” Duluth News-Tribune, 2 Feb. 1939.

  Trumbull, Henry Clay. Teaching and Teachers. Philadelphia: John D. Wattles, 1884.

  United States, Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Juvenile Delinquents in Public Institutions, 1933. Government Printing Office, 1936.

  ADDITIONAL REFERENCE MATERIALS

  BOOKS

  Alexander, Ruth M. “The Girl Problem”: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York 1900–1930. Cornell UP, 1995.

  Brenzel, Barbara. Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856–1905. MIT P, 1983.

  Chatelain, Marcia. South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration. Duke UP, 2015.

  Chesney-Lind, Meda, and Randall G. Sheldon. Girls: Delinquency and Juvenile Justice. Brooks/Cole, 1992.

  Chesney-Lind, Meda, and Lisa Pasko. The Female Offender: Girls, Women, and Crime. 2nd ed., Sage, 2004.

  Cressey, Paul G. The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life. 1932. U of Chicago P, 2008.

  Dodge, L. Mara. “Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind”: A Study of Women, Crime and Prisons, 1835–2000. Northern Illinois UP, 2006.

  Inness, Sherrie A. Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. NYU P, 1998.

  Karlen, Neal. Augie’s Secrets: The Minneapolis Mob and the King of the Hennepin Strip. Minnesota Historical Society P, 2014.

  Konopka, Gisela. The Adolescent Girl in Conflict. Prentice Hall, 1966.

  Kunzel, Regina G. Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945. Yale UP, 1995.

  Lindenmeyer, Kriste. The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s. Ivan R. Dee, 2005.

  McDonald, Joan. A History of the Minnesota Home School 1911–1976. Minnesota Home School Citizens Committee, 1976.

  Odem, Mary E. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920. U of North Carolina P, 1995.

  Platt, Anthony M. The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. 1969. Rutgers UP, 2009.

  Rosheim, David L. The Other Minneapolis, or A History of the Minneapolis Skid Row. Andromeda, 1978.

  Salerno, Roger A. Sociology Noir: Studies at the University of Chicago in Loneliness, Marginality and Deviance, 1915–1935. McFarland & Company, 2007.

  Solinger, Rickie. Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe V. Wade. Routledge, 1992.

  Thomas, William I. The Unadjusted Girl. Little Brown, 1923.

  Tice, Karen W. Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work. U of Illinois P, 1998.

  Tiffin, Susan. In Whose Best Interest? Child Welfare Reform in the Progressive Era. Praeger, 1982.

  Zahn, Margaret A., editor. The Delinquent Girl. Temple UP, 2009.

  REPORTS AND GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS

  Dietzler, Mary Macey. Detention Houses and Reformatories as Protective Social Agencies in the Campaign of the United States Government Against Venereal Diseases. The United States Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board, Government Printing Office, June 1922.

  Epstein, Rebecca, Yasmin Vafa, and Rebecca Burney, editors. I Am the Voice: Girls’ Reflections from Inside the Justice System. Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality; Rights4Girls, 2018.

  Gibson, Campbell, and Kay Jung. United States, Census Bureau, Population Division, Working Paper No. 56. Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 To 1990, and By Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for the United States, Regions, Divisions, and States. Government Printing Office, Sept. 2002.

  Kerig, Patricia K., and Julian D. Ford. Trauma Among Girls in the Juvenile Justice System. National Child Traumatic Stress Network Center for Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice, and the Network Juvenile Justice Working Group, 2014.

  LaDu, Blanche L. A Picture of Minnesota in 1932. Address given at the State Conference of Social Work, Sept. 1932.

  Saar, Malika Saada, Rebecca Epstein, Lindsay Rosenthal, and Yasmin Vafa. The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story. Human Rights Projects for Girls, Georg
etown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, Ms. Foundation for Women, 2015.

  Sherman, Francine T., and Annie Balck. Gender Injustice: System-Level Juvenile Justice Reforms for Girls. The National Crittenton Foundation, and National Women’s Law Center, 2015.

  State of Minnesota, Office of the Legislative Auditor, Program Evaluation Division. Residential Facilities for Juvenile Offenders. Feb. 1995.

  Swayze, Dana Hurley, and Danette Buskovick. Youth in Minnesota Correctional Facilities: Responses to the 2013 Minnesota Student Survey. Minnesota Department of Public Safety Office of Justice Programs, Oct. 2014.

  Weber, Laura E. “Gentiles Preferred”: Minneapolis Jews and Employment, 1920–1950. Minnesota Historical Society, Spring 1991.

  MEDIA

  Bernstein, Nina. “Ward of the State: The Gap in Ella Fitzgerald’s Life.” The New York Times, 23 June 1996, p. D4.

  Brown, Curt. “Anti-Semitism Flared in Minnesota Long Ago.” Star Tribune, 18 Mar. 2017, http://www.startribune.com/anti-semitism- flared-in-minnesota-long-ago/416516923.

  Franklin, Robert. “A Hard Look Back at the Old Home School.” Star Tribune, 13 Jan. 2002, p. 9B.