Policing sex in the Sunflower State : the story of the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women / Nicole Perry.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Perry, Nicole, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women.

Reformatories for women--Kansas--History--20th century.

Reformatories for women.

Women prisoners--Kansas--History--20th century.

Women prisoners.

Sexually transmitted diseases--Government policy--Kansas--History--20th century.

Sexually transmitted diseases.

Women--Sexual behavior--Kansas--History--20th century.

Women.

Sex discrimination against women--Kansas--History--20th century.

Sex discrimination against women.

Sex--Kansas--History--20th century.

Sex.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (290 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Lawrence, Kansas : University Press of Kansas, [2021]

Summary:

"Policing Sex in the Sunflower State recounts the little-known story of Chapter 205, a state law that gave the Kansas Board of Health broad powers to quarantine individuals with venereal diseases. Though the law was officially gender-neutral and the state initially detained a few men under the ordinance, Chapter 205 was almost exclusively enforced against women by the early 1920s. State officials quarantined women alongside regular female prisoners at the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women (KSIFW) throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with women sentenced under Chapter 205 averaging 71% of the total inmate population between 1918 and 1942. Their confinement at the WIF was indefinite, with doctors and superintendents deciding when they were physically and morally "cured" enough to reenter society; in practice, women detained under Chapter 205 spent an average of four months at the Farm. Though the numbers of women imprisoned under Chapter 205 declined in the 1940s, women were quarantined under the law as late as 1955. Policing Sex in the Sunflower State tells the story of Chapter 205 through the experiences of three groups of women-the activist women who lobbied to create the Farm, the professional women who ran it, and the working-class women who were imprisoned there-in order to explore the intersections of social hierarchies in interwar Kansas"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. World War I, Sexuality, and Venereal Disease Control in Kansas

2. Prisoners First, Patients Second: The Transition to a Peacetime Veneral Disease Control Policy

3. "Anything to Please the Ladies": The Activist Women Who Founded the KSIFW

4. Training Inmates for Respectability: The Professional Women of the KSIFW

5. Paths to the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women

6. Staking a Claim to Respectability: Inmate Accounts of Their Sexual Pasts

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Back Cover.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes index.

Kansas Notable Book, 2022

ISBN:

0-7006-3189-5

OCLC:

1263026387