White Southern Girlhood and Eugenics: A Talk With Historian Karin Zipf - Rewire
"From 1929 to the mid-1970s, North Carolina sterilized about 7,600
people in the nation’s most aggressive program of its kind. It was all
in the name of eugenics, a coin termed by Francis Galton to describe
efforts to “improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.”
The program stopped as opinions began to shift surrounding eugenics—and
lawsuits were filed against North Carolina’s Eugenics Board on behalf
of those who had been sterilized—but 30 states participated in similar ones targeting a wide range of people, including people with disabilities and other disadvantaged groups.
"Seventy-seven percent of all those sterilized in North Carolina were
women; about 2,000 were people 18 and younger. Before the 1960s—when
Black people became the majority of those sterilized—poor, rural white
girls were the primary targets of authorities and women reformers. Girls
were punished for engaging in so-called “deviant” behaviors, such as
sexual activity or crossing racial lines in their romantic interests.
Poor white girls who were sexually abused were also criminalized,
labeled “feeble-minded,” and institutionalized.
"This is the
history explored by East Carolina University professor Karin Zipf in her
new book, Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a
Southern Juvenile Reformatory. Samarcand Manor, North Carolina’s
“industrial school” for girls, was a juvenile facility designed to keep
troubled girls “in line.” In reality, this whites-only institution in
the town of Eagle Springs was a violent place where courts, social
workers, and parents committed young white girls for not adhering to
social norms or the rules of white supremacy.
"Founded in 1918,
the institution began sterilizing girls after 16 girls set fire to two
Samarcand dormitories in 1931. Officials believed that sterilizing the
girls by tubal ligation would stop them from passing on “defective”
genes. Though the justifications for the so-called treatments varied
among groups in power, the prescription remained the same. Hundreds of
girls and young women suffered forced sterilizations before the state
sterilization program ended. Samarcand closed in 2011, but it was reborn
as a new law enforcement training facility in 2015."
In 20th-century North Carolina, poor white girls who offended
social norms could be sent to the Samarcand reformatory in Eagle
Springs, North Carolina. They performed farm labor as part of their
"rehabilitation," which also often included forced sterilization for
girls believed to be sexually promiscuous or to possess "defective"
genes.
Karen Zipf
