The Confinement of Sexuality:

Institutionalization as a Eugenic Tactic in Indiana’s Progressive Era

by Molly Whitted

Presented at the Indiana Historical Society Conference on

Hoosier Women at Work for Suffrage and Citizenship

March 7, 2020

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while women all over this country fought for political equality and voting rights, thousands were legally being deprived of their basic rights to marry, have children or even have a life outside the confines of an institutional wall. The women’s suffrage movement and the rise of the eugenics movement occurred during the same time period, with often intersecting discourse. Eugenics was the attempt to improve the population’s genetic composition by legally and forcibly discouraging the reproduction of people deemed unfit, using such methods as sterilization and segregation. This campaign resulted in widespread gender-based oppression, even as women were achieving political gains.”

Indiana is most famously known as the first state in the U.S. to pass a compulsory sterilization law in 1907, making it legal to involuntarily surgically sterilize inmates in Indiana’s institutions. Another Indiana eugenic law, passed in 1905, was a marriage regulation law that prohibited marriage licenses to certain individuals. However, predating both of those eugenic laws was one that historians have largely overlooked; a law that detrimentally affected the quality of life for hundreds of women in Indiana for decades.

Indiana Governor Winfield Durbin passed a law in 1901, mere months after taking office, that made it legal to commit and confine women, exclusively, into custodial institutions for feebleminded persons. These women were segregated into these institutions for the whole of their childbearing years, from ages 16-45, for non-criminal offenses. In fact, all it took to warrant this legal confinement was the accusation of being immoral due to an inappropriate level of hyper-sexuality, rather than any actual need for long term custodial care. In order to commit an adult female, any person could file a petition with the clerk of their county’s Circuit Court. The woman in question would then be investigated, questioned by the judge and committed if he deemed her unfit. These women were given no formal trial and were systematically denied due process of the law.

Amidst all the industrial, political, and social change brought about in the Progressive Era, many women were adapting and were no longer confining themselves to the predetermined concept of what a woman should be. They were breaking away from the traditional prescribed gender roles and strict religious moral principles that predominated in the conservative Victorian Era. In response to this radical shift in gender norms, the white middle and upper classes of this country made a desperate attempt to keep the conventional paradigm of the “true woman”, her virtue and her sexual morality intact in order to protect the sanctity of the home and ensure the perpetuation of future generations of upstanding moral citizens. By and large, however, it was the poorer lower class, the prostitute and the immigrant that reformers, crusaders and eugenicists focused their fears on.

Eugenicists sought to achieve both class and racial purity using ethically questionable scientific and sociological “advancements” for the time to control these women’s sexuality and reproduction. Their goal was to eradicate an entire subset of U.S. citizens they considered unfit and inferior. A new terminology was even developed for the so-called unfit. They were labeled as imbeciles, idiots, morons, defectives, delinquents and deviants; or, were more broadly defined as feebleminded. The scientific ideology of the time supposed that feeblemindedness was an inherited and incurable disease rendering the individual mentally underdeveloped at a level far below that of adult intelligence. They attributed any immoral, criminal, or hyper-sexual behavior to the “disease” of feeblemindedness that had been passed on through faulty genes.

Naturally, women would become the primary target for reformers, purity crusaders and eugenicists as they were considered not only biologically responsible for the perpetuation of the fittest of our species but also for maintaining “female heterosexual virtuous norms”.  The feebleminded woman was considered an anomaly and the most dangerous of all the different types of defectives specifically because of her sexuality. The notion that any woman would ever want to have sex with any man other than her husband for any reason other than maternity was incomprehensible. Women that showed any sexual independence were assumed incapable of being in control of their primitive urges or mental faculties and so must surely be feebleminded, insane or psychopathic. In fact, if a male was considered feebleminded, he was merely thought of as a non-productive member of society, economically speaking. However, female feeblemindedness was always associated with her morality and sexuality.

Many members of the Indiana Board of State Charities, an agency created to oversee most of the  state-run institutions, felt a strong necessity to check the moral depravity of the promiscuous woman in order to prevent her from having any illegitimate, and unquestionably feebleminded, children that would inevitably require support by the state in county poor houses, asylums or with church charities. With this justification they began advocating for the permanent confinement of these women. In the BSC’s Fourth Report (1892-1893) it states, “Observation has long ago shown that a large proportion of such females bear children, usually illegitimate and almost invariably deficient mentally. The large number of children born of feebleminded mothers in the county poor asylums of Indiana proves that those institutions offer slight protection.” The BSC goes on to reason that, “There is hardly a poor house in this land where there are not two or more feebleminded women with from 1 to 4 illegitimate children each. There is every reason in morality, humanity, and public policy that these feebleminded women should be under permanent and watchful guardianship, especially during childbearing ages.”

Indiana, however, was in no way a pioneer in the implementation of segregating “feeble-minded” women as a eugenic strategy. Amos Butler commended previous states for paving the way for Indiana’s 1901 segregation law when he wrote, “A few states have established custodial institutions for the detention and care of feeble-minded women during the reproductive period. Here they have regular habits; their strength is employed in useful service and their passions are restrained. Forever they are separated from the world. One’s feelings are those of gratitude to the states which have shown such wisdom.”  The “useful service” he refers to is the forced unpaid labor of the confined women by the institution in exchange for their room and board. These women were made to do the institution’s laundry, dishes, sewing and gardening, among other things, in order to cut the costs to the state.

Inspired by the successful eugenic tactic of isolation used in other states, the BSC continued to push their agenda for state intervention to segregate and permanently confine “feebleminded” women.  Their objective was to quell the breeding of the lower classes and permanently sever the entire familial line, thereby restoring the moral fiber of society. In the BSC’s Fifth Report (1883-1884) they asserted,

The presence of a single feeble-minded woman is often sufficient to seriously demoralize the peace and morality of a community. These women, wherever they may be, must be supported by the public. It were better to place them in a carefully managed state institution where they would be safe from temptation and vices to which they are especially subject, and where their evil influence could not be exerted to injure the morals of others.  

Finally, in 1901 they achieved their goal of securing the decree necessary to dispose of the lascivious women of Indiana.

The initial facility the “feeble-minded” Hoosier women were sent to was the Indiana State School for Feeble-Minded Youth in Fort Wayne. Before the 1901 law was passed only children with marked learning disabilities, deformities or epilepsy were housed there. However, along with the passage of this law, $40,000 was appropriated to the school to build the women their own individual cottage with a capacity of 130. The 25th Annual Report (1903) of the ISFMY provides a brief glimpse into the experience of the women confined. It states that, “all contribute toward performing the domestic work connected with the cottage” and that “They have an industrial department in which is manufactured, under the supervision of one paid employee, the bedding, clothing, etc., intended for their use”. The report points out that because these women must be completely isolated, a teacher comes and “visits the cottage twice each week, devoting thirty minutes each time to exercise.” There are also a small group of these women who tend the garden and learn lace making.

However, in a 1906 report entitled Manual Training for Feebleminded Women presented by Alexander Johnson during the 14th State Conference of Charities and Corrections, Johnson reveals another version of the early days in the women’s custodial cottage.

When the cottage was completed and the women were received, it was found necessary to send there some of the upper grade girls of the school to do their housework. The girls had been trained from childhood in the school and had grown up capable, happy, industrious and able-bodied, but the women had had no such training and could not do even ordinary housework. However, …at the end of the year…not only were the women doing their own work, but four or five were helping out in other places. They began by doing their own laundry work, washing their hosiery and underclothes, and after awhile they took up other things…. They are also doing a great deal of other work.

He goes on to describe the women, stating, “So about one-third of the feebleminded women…are practically self-supporting. Another third can do some work, such as sweeping, dusting, and perhaps even making the beds, and the other third are helpless and the others must care for them.”

In 1902, in their Fourteenth Report, the BSC applauded themselves for a job well done.  

Ninety women who are not able to control themselves are there. Before their admission many of them had been the cause of social troubles and the spread of disease. Others were the mothers of a number of feeble-minded children, most of whom were illegitimate. Some were such depraved creatures that they were terrors to the communities where they had their homes. In their new home, which the state has provided, they are taught cleanliness and regular habits; are trained to work and are given employment…There women do the washing, cleaning, household work and sewing…Yet it costs little if any more to support them here in this manner than to permit them to remain in the poor asylums, where they lack employment and restraint and are perpetuating other generations of defectives whom we must support.

By 1905 the Board of State Charities were already requesting more money from the state in order to expand the housing for women at the Indiana State School for Feeble-Minded Youth.  Harper’s Lodge, the original lone cottage, had long been well over its intended capacity, and the school had a continuous waiting list. As the 25th Annual Report of the ISFMY (1903) reminds, “These women are not committed with the thought that they at some future time be discharged as persons capable of caring for themselves, but that they may be guarded and protected, so that procreation of their kind…is stopped.”  Consequentially, another $60,000 was appropriated in 1908 for the erection of another custodial cottage for women. The construction for this cottage was finished in 1911, and with it came an amendment of the 1901 law that stated “no adult woman shall be admitted into the Indiana School for Feebleminded Youth unless committed thereto by the circuit court”.

One year later, due to the rapid commitments by the courts and the immense overcrowding in the adult female custodial department, the Fort Wayne school was entreating the state to build more facilities for the care of the feebleminded women. Not until 1920 would the state build a new institution in southern Indiana in 1920 for both feeble-minded men and women, calling it Muscatatuk State School.

The fact that these women were sent to a school for feeble-minded youth demonstrates the way in which women were infantilized by the conditions of hegemonic masculinity. The deeply entrenched androcentrism of this time period had not yet truly been challenged by women. The systematic patriarchal control held over all public spheres worked together to keep women from gaining neither independence (sexual or otherwise) nor political equality. This can be seen quite clearly when looking back at both the eugenics and the women’s suffrage movements. In the book Is Everyone Really Equal? By Robin DiAngelo and Özlem Sensoy, they explain exactly how this patriarchal system collaborated to try to prevent women that were fighting in the suffrage movement from gaining ground in the public sphere. They write,

While male government officials denied women the right to vote, all other institutions of society were also dominated by men and worked simultaneously with government to block suffrage. Male doctors claimed that women did not have the physical capacity to engage in politics, male psychiatrists claimed that women did not have the capacity for rational thought necessary for suffrage, male clergy preached that a woman’s place was in the home and ordained by (a male) God, male journalists published editorials critiquing suffrage, male police officers shut down demonstrations and made arrests, and male judges determined punishments.

Men were clearly the leading antagonists for women fighting for suffrage, and certainly at the forefront of enacting laws and carrying out eugenic strategy. However, it was not men alone that advocated for selective breeding and racial purity. With both movements regarding female agency taking place at the same time it is not surprising that the women fighting for suffrage would have a personal position concerning eugenics. What may be surprising is that many of the suffragists and first wave feminists were actually for it; irrespective of the fact that they were in effect placing the same restrictions on some women that they themselves were fighting to remove.

Prominent suffragists and feminists of the time, such as Margaret Sanger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances Willard, and Victoria Woodhull all had a different style to their approach of eugenics, but all with the same basic premise. These women argued that their positionality gave them a unique authority over reproductive issues and that gender equality was imperative in eugenically advancing racial purity. Necessitating their feminist viewpoints on selective reproduction and female agency as a justification for gender equality was what Caleb Saleeby termed “eugenic feminism” in his 1911 book Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles.

Margaret Sanger, the most famous eugenic feminist known for opening the first birth control clinic in America, was also an ardent supporter of other eugenic strategies as well. In her book, Pivot of Civilization, written in 1922, she contends, “Every feebleminded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period”.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman advocated for the legalization of birth control and sexual equality for women. She also wrote the book Herland (1915) with a predominantly eugenic narrative. Frances Willard, second president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, added several reform campaigns to the WCTU that were eugenic in nature, such as hygiene and heredity.

Still, Victoria Woodhull, though not as famed as Sanger, may conceivably have been the most revolutionary female activist during the 19th century. She was the first female stockbroker on Wall Street and the first woman to ever run for president in the United States in 1872. Author Michael W. Perry even alleges in his 2005 book, Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and Writings of Victoria Woodhull, that she was also the first person to publicly promote eugenic ideologies, even before Francis Galton, the man who coined the term “eugenics” in 1883. Woodhull scrutinized the sexual slavery of marriage and endorsed women’s freedom to choose whom they would reproduce with in order to ensure the best possible outcome of offspring. She gave several public speeches all over the country and Europe and wrote multiple books promoting selective breeding for the intention of racial purity, such as The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit (1891) and The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race, Or, Humanitarian Aspects of Finance and Marriage: The Science of Well Being (1893), making quite clear her stance on eugenic feminism.

The patronage of some of the country’s most prominent first wave feminists pushing for eugenics and the state of Indiana both played pivotal roles in the subjugation of women in the early 20th century. Indiana was the first state in the country to pass a law making it legal to surgically manipulate a woman’s body, depriving her of her biological, God-given right to reproduce. It was also one of the first states in the country to put into policy the legal right to incarcerate women, for a nearly their entire lives, solely based on the subjective opinion of the woman’s character and not on the objectivity of factual criminal offenses. By putting into place laws that directly dominated the female body, Indiana legally took part in violation of thousands of American women’s constitutional rights for over six decades. And the women who fought so ardently to obtain gender equality and political freedom encouraged and applauded it.