Title: Eliminating Contagion, Embodying Innocence: Pedagogies of Desexualization at the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1915-1940
Abstract: Until the early twentieth century, African American girls in the state of Virginia who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in trouble with the law were routinely incarcerated alongside adult offenders in local jails and in the state penitentiary. After years of fundraising and political strategizing, the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs established the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls in 1915 as an alternative to punitive settings for delinquent black girls. Rather than accept the prevailing cultural logic that both deemed black children to be already adult and presumed the sexual availability of black women, these activists and educators posited the countercultural idea of black girlhood as a time of vulnerability and potential that was deserving of protection. Delinquent black girls were committed to the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls from courts across the state of Virginia. Delinquency, a term that on its face points to adolescent misbehavior writ large, was in fact a label with highly gendered meanings. For black and white American girls alike, the development of the juvenile justice system, juvenile courts, and juvenile reformatories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was tied to the goal of regulating adolescent female sexuality in the context of urbanization, immigration, industrialization, and young women’s greater levels of independence and lesser levels of supervision. The earliest reports of Richmond, Virginia’s Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court indicate that girls were disproportionally charged with “disorderly conduct,” “offenses against morality,” and “incorrigibility”—terms that mask sexual behavior or refer to the rebellion of a girl child. African American girls, already perceived as prematurely sexual, were overrepresented in all of these categories. When they arrived at the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, many adolescent girls were already infected with venereal diseases, further pointing to both premature consensual sexual activity and sexual victimization as factors contributing to girls’ encounters with law enforcement and courts. Its black women founders designed the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls to preserve for some girls, and restore for others, a desexualized girlhood. This paper examines evidence from juvenile court records and individual girls’ state juvenile justice records to reveal how the state, through processes of labeling, effectively marked black girls as sexualized. This paper also examines how school leaders designed the school’s honor system, disciplinary practices, built environment, and material culture to reverse these processes of sexualization and criminalization and restore the benefits of childhood innocence to girls rarely deemed worthy of the age- and gender-specific considerations given to their white counterparts. Through healing the body of (particularly venereal) disease; ensuring that moral development was reflected in different styles and colors of uniform; and teaching physical activity as an important part of everyday life, the women of the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs hoped to erase the externally-imposed mark of premature sexuality and replace it with a disciplined, pure body capable of experiencing childhood joy.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-02-26
Language: en
Type: article
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