Marcattilio-McCracken applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Incorrigibles: Eugenics and Sterilization in the Kansas Industrial School for Girls, and reported the following:
As much as I was hoping otherwise for the sake of some fun, page 99 of The Incorrigibles actually does a decent job of capturing the spirit and themes of the book. At its heart, The Incorrigibles is about how the ideas behind the early 20th-century eugenics movement in Kansas manifested in the form of forced sterilization regimes in, among other places, a juvenile reform school for young girls. Coming in the fourth chapter by page 99, we’ve by now shrunk our lens to its narrowest point in order to look at the sixteen-month window - September 1935 to June 1936 - when more than half of the girls at the school were sterilized by the superintendent.Learn more about The Incorrigibles at the University of Nebraska Press website.
The page gets to the heart of the question the book asks: Why were these girls sterilized? Should we believe Superintendent Lula Coyner and her Board, who said it was because they were so amoral, promiscuous, and socially undesirable that it was in the name of the greater good? Or the girls, who said they were being sterilized as punishment for acting out and as part of a campaign of terror by school leadership?
Chapter 4 runs through the gamut of scenarios – from the categories named in the state sterilization law, to the common justifications by eugenicists in other states, to the punitive scheme explained by the girls themselves. What does it find? Page 99 gives us a telling glimpse:The Kallikak’s of Kansas study seventeen years earlier outlined the remaining “serious physical or family handicaps” Coyner might have been thinking of to qualify girls for sterilization, lest they be passed on to future generations: feeblemindedness, alcoholism, incest, interracial marriage, producing illegitimate children, degenerate parents, or a family history of pauperism are all mentioned in the 1918 report. Setting aside the shaky scientific ground on which many of these vague categories stood, this represents well the broad categories of people pursued by sterilization laws and eugenics activists elsewhere across the country. Alcoholism and family histories of degeneracy or pauperism are the least precise charges here in addition to being perhaps the most cited in the history of eugenics, from the first wave of eugenic family studies in the 1870s, to the Fitter Family contests in the 1910s, to the long monographs written by adherents of the movement through the 1920s. But as was found time and again, proving a contemporary genetic basis for degeneracy and pauperism was difficult, despite repeated attempts.In the end, as with so many things in life, we’re ultimately left unsatisfied - suspecting strongly that the girls’ accusations against Coyner are correct, but unable to prove it definitively.
Agnes Kelley’s inmate history provides a good example of the qualitative evidence eugenicists would point to: it says that her mother and father and older sister all had “moral reputations,” that the mother had spent time at Lansing, that the mother and father were separated but not divorced, and that the family had eight children and were on relief. Thankfully, Agnes was lucky enough to be admitted in October of 1937, after the sterilization episode had passed.
Of the demographic data collected about arrivals, a parental history of intemperance remains the one category we cannot rule out. This was another example of something borrowed from H.H. Goddard and the project of measuring intelligence and constructing and defining feeblemindedness. Lela Zenderland writes in Measuring Minds that for eugenicists “chronic drinking was simply another consequence of diminished intellectual capacity,” and they were quick to assert that the condition was a hereditary one. Nine of the girls in the 1935 cohort answered yes to the question of whether they had a parent who was “intemperate,” with seven listing their fathers, one listing her mother, and one who cited both. All of the latter were sterilized. Lest we put too much weight on this one index, this accounts for just fifteen percent of those who were sterilized; fifty-one girls told GIS staff that neither parent had been intemperate, yet were nevertheless operated upon.
That those who were sterilized belong in the remaining categories above is a far less persuasive assertion. Of incest, neither the 1935 cohort inmate histories nor any of the other institutional data record no evidence of girls who were victims of abuse, though we know from the PWTC report in 1933 that roughly ten percent of the girls who arrived reported that they had been sexually abused or exploited by a family member...
What does the test using page 99 miss from The Incorrigibles? It doesn’t seem like much, actually, which makes me wonder how much of the narrative I could’ve axed, saving myself and the reader time, and the press some money…
--Marshal Zeringue
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