Contemporary Authors

• Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919 Louisiana State University Pres (Baton Rouge, LA), 2005
• Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2016

Library of Congress Online Catalog 1. Labor of innocents : forced apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919 LCCN 2004023426 Type of material Book Personal name Zipf, Karin L., 1968- Main title Labor of innocents : forced apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919 / Karin L. Zipf. Published/Created Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, c2005. Description xi, 207 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0807130451 (cloth : alk. paper) Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip053/2004023426.html CALL NUMBER HD6250.U4 N89 2005 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. Bad girls at Samarcand : sexuality and sterilization in a southern juvenile reformatory LCCN 2015035731 Type of material Book Personal name Zipf, Karin L., 1968- author. Main title Bad girls at Samarcand : sexuality and sterilization in a southern juvenile reformatory / Karin L. Zipf. Published/Produced Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2016] Description xii, 242 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780807162491 (cloth : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER HV9015.N82 Z57 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• East Carolina U - http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cas/history/Zipf.cfm

  Karin L. Zipf
  Zipf, Karin

  Professor of History
  Ph.D., University of Georgia
  Phone: 252-328-1024
  Office: Brewster A-219
  Fax: 252-328-6774
  Email: zipfk@ecu.edu

  About

  Dr. Karin Zipf's North Carolina roots run deep. Born in Durham and raised in Rocky Mount, she developed a fascination for southern history. As a college student, she attended and graduated from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. After six years pursuing her masters and doctoral degrees in history at the University of Georgia, Zipf returned to North Carolina to teach at North Carolina Wesleyan College. From 2000-01 she served on the faculty at Appalachian State University in Boone. In August 2001, she joined the East Carolina University History Department in Greenville.
  As her life and career have progressed, Dr. Zipf has reaffirmed her deep and abiding intellectual interest in the history of the United States, the American South, and the Atlantic World. Her interests lie in the study of gender, sexuality and race relations in the 19th and early 20th century American South. Her book, Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919 appeared in 2005. The book examines the social and legal impact of apprenticeship on historical constructions of the family and patriarchal relations. Her articles on gender, race, women, apprenticeship, and Reconstruction have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of Women's History, the North Carolina Historical Review, and the Georgia Historical Quarterly. Her most recent book, Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory (LSU Press, 2016), examines North Carolina's institutionalization and sterilization of juveniles in the Depression-era South.
  Recent Publications:

  Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory. LSU Press, 2016.
  Winner of the 2016 Jules and Frances Landry Award in Southern Studies.

  Winner of the 2016 Ragan Old North State Award for Non Fiction.

  Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919 (LSU Press, 2005).

  “Money in the Bank: African American Women, Finance, and Freedom in New Bern, North Carolina, 1868-1874” in eds., Larry E. Tise and Jeffrey J. Crow, New Voyages to Carolina: Reinterpreting North Carolina History (UNC Press, 2017): 166-193.
  "In Defense of the Nation: Syphilis, North Carolina's "Girl Problem," and World War I." North Carolina Historical Review. 89 (July 2012) 3: 276-300.
  Digital Humanities Project:

  "Politics of a Massacre: Discovering Wilmington, 1898."

  http://core.ecu.edu/umc/wilmington
  Courses Offered:

  HIST 1050: American History to 1877
  HIST 3140: Women in American History
  HIST 3000: History: Its Nature and Method
  HIST 5220: Gender and the Atlantic World
  HIST 5141: The U.S. South Since 1877
  HIST 6020: American Colonial History
  HIST 6155: Gender and the Cold War
  HNRS 2011: Honors College Seminar: Humanities
  WOST 4000: Senior Seminar in Women’s Studies

• Rewire - https://rewire.news/article/2016/05/27/white-southern-girlhood-eugenics-talk-historian-karin-zipf/

  White Southern Girlhood and Eugenics: A Talk With Historian Karin Zipf

  May 27, 2016, 1:00pm Tina Vasquez

  The same white supremacy that declared Black men and women to be hypersexual also subjected troubled or abused white girls to incarceration and state-sponsored sterilizations to make sure the teens did not pass on "bad" genes and "ruin the race."
  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

  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.
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  Author Zipf spoke to Rewire about early 20th-century eugenics beliefs, the dangers of Southern white womanhood, and Samarcand Manor’s legacy.

  Rewire: How do you remember first hearing about Samarcand Manor?

  Karin Zipf: There were about two or three articles that came out in the late ’90s on institutions, [which] referenced the arson case at Samarcand where the girls burned down their dormitories. The girls at Samarcand were arrested on arson, which at the time could result in a death penalty charge. [The charges were reduced, and some of the girls were incarcerated.] So, historians knew of this case, but few had written on it. One book that was particularly interesting to me is by a historian named Susan Cahn—I have to shout out to her. Her book, Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age, was really inspiring. She wrote one chapter on the fire.

  Rewire: What were some of the challenges of tackling Samarcand’s history?

  KZ: The research was challenging. I didn’t have any oral history to rely on because everyone I might have interviewed was deceased. State restrictions were hard to get around because we’re dealing with sensitive information here and generally, health records are closed to the public too. It’s a double-edged sword because obviously, policies are put in place to protect people’s privacy. But on the other hand, it makes it very difficult for researchers to go in and see how the state treats children.

  Rewire: Often when we talk about white supremacy, the focus is how it affects people of color. But it was very interesting to explore how white supremacy affects white girls and women in particular. In some ways, is Samarcand is a direct result of white supremacy and wanting young girls to conform to feminine representations of it?

  KZ: This is what I find to be the real topic here. I teach and research U.S. Southern history, so race is obviously a very important part of that. When I learned this was an institution only for white girls, I knew white supremacy was central to the story, especially because I knew that African-American girls in need at the same time were literally left on the street.

  The state and upper-class women reformers believed these young white girls to have fallen from some sort of grace by becoming [sex workers] or choosing sexually active lifestyles. Reformers—those who pushed for the [initial] creation of Samarcand—believed that when [a white girl] falls from grace, she can get back up again. If you were a white girl, it was their job to help you get back up again.

  At this same time, there was a white supremacy movement that was impacting how eugenics was viewed. … This wasn’t just in North Carolina, of course, but here eugenics beliefs were on the upswing, especially this idea that there were genetic defects that caused differences in society. Eugenicists believed genetic defects caused poverty, promiscuity, delinquency, etc.

  There were people at the time who called themselves mental hygienists, who had a different understanding of womanhood than the Victorian reformers who saw “fallen” girls as disgraced. For example, they saw sexuality as a positive thing, provided it occurred within the confines of marriage. They believed women had sexual desires, that they were sexual beings, but that girls who were “mentally defective”—as they called it—gravitated to promiscuity or delinquency.

  Victorian reformers and mental hygienists expressed two different attitudes about womanhood, but both were informed by constructions of whiteness and how that should look or be defined. Mental hygienists believed these girls had become so impoverished, they could not be saved. [Their behavior] was believed to be a genetic impurity that was going to spoil the white race, so they needed to be institutionalized and segregated from society at places like Samarcand—and this often also meant being sterilized.

  Rewire: Some of the most interesting areas of your book delved into the historical meaning of Southern white womanhood and how this particular racist brand of womanhood deeply influenced eugenic science, especially in North Carolina. Talk to me about that.

  KZ: The concept of Southern white womanhood is very much a multitiered system defined by race and sexuality. White men are at the top, they’re the top tier. They are seen as the protectors, and they are seen as the breadwinners. They believe themselves to be providing law and order, especially when it comes to race.

  Next are white women, who are seen as chaste, virtuous, passive, obedient, domestic, and motherly. If they do enter into the public arena, it’s for the purpose of “public housekeeping,” [such as social work and advocacy for children].

  Southern white womanhood rests on this ideal these young girls could not really meet. These were girls from the very bottom of the white social ladder; they were in abject poverty. These girls were out in the street hanging out with all kinds of people; they weren’t at home doing domestic chores. The big fear was that these girls were going to have children with Black men. White supremacists saw these girls’ lifestyles as the worst-case scenario for white supremacy; they believed these white girls were going to spoil the race by having children with men of color. This is why these girls were so strictly policed, perhaps more than other demographic group.

  African-American men occupy the third tier. According to white supremacist beliefs, African-American men are aggressive. If you look at images from this time, they’re really horrible. Black men are portrayed as beastly, as predators, and what they want is access to white women. I strongly believe that so much of what Jim Crow was about was to separate Black men from white women.

  In this system, Black women are at the bottom. They are seen as the opposite of pure, virtuous white women. The word often used at the time was “lascivious,” and African-American women were often referred to as “Jezebels.” The reason why reform efforts were focused on white girls is because white reformers assumed that Black girls and girls of color couldn’t be saved.

  Rewire: I assumed that the way we put white womanhood on a pedestal protects all white women, but your book is an example of how that’s not always the case. Upholding Southern white womanhood in particular is also harmful to certain kinds of white women. How much is class responsible for this?

  KZ: Around the same time as the early days of Samarcand, there were a number of textile strikes, which [often] involved young women. Some of the girls at Samarcand were cotton mill workers or the children of cotton mill workers. Affluent whites already had negative associations with textile workers because of the strikes, so there’s already a sort of demonization of the working class—and this is part of our history we don’t talk about enough. There were strikes all over the South, but it’s a part of North Carolina history that’s almost been lost.

  You have these girls who are wearing overalls with caps twisted backwards, and they’re protesting and yelling in the streets. Today, society views protesters as socially disruptive at best, but back then these young girls were seen as ruining the race.

  Rewire: Your book has an entire chapter on Kate Burr Johnson, who is written about rather favorably in North Carolina history, even while promoting eugenics and white supremacist ideals as the first woman state commissioner of public welfare from 1921 to 1930. She emphasized the interplay of culture and biology, which was, at the time, a pretty common stance in the South among intellectuals. Why was this such a popular idea?

  KZ: Eugenicists generally agreed with the idea that “cultural” characteristics like juvenile delinquency, promiscuity, and poverty were passed through genes. The belief was that once those genes get into the line, there is no getting them out—and it didn’t matter what race you were.

  But Southern eugenicists, such as Kate Burr Johnson, formulated a different theory to protect their belief in “white purity.” Southern eugenicists didn’t want to say that there was something in white people’s genetics that made them defective; that meant whites couldn’t be inherently superior. They had to get around that idea somehow, so Southern white eugenicists adopted a theory from a biologist named [Jean-Baptiste] Lamarck, which said that genes can mutate based on the environment and then those mutated genes can be passed on and introduced into the DNA of offspring.

  The way that Southern eugenicists were able to sidestep any contradictions poor whites posed to white supremacy was by explaining that some white people became impoverished, for example, and when their poverty continued for generation after generation, then that environment of poverty affected their genetic makeup. Kate Burr Johnson really believed that poor whites’ DNA became disfigured to the point that they lost their whiteness. Other eugenicists weren’t buying it, but the Southern eugenicists were trying to figure out a way to modify the eugenics argument in order to meet their need of carrying on this idea of the “purity” of the white race.

  Rewire: The ableism of the time was also pretty extreme. Young girls who were sexually assaulted were deemed “mentally defective” or “feeble-minded.” How was ableism used to further stigmatize these girls?

  KZ: That was a really hard part of this research, honestly. In some instances, we’re talking about girls as young as 10 years old, raped by their own fathers, yet they’re being labeled as “mentally defective.” These girls were forced to take IQ tests designed for 19-year-old World War I-era soldiers. When these girls failed the tests—especially those already labeled as promiscuous—they were classified as “feeble-minded.”

  In my reading of these records, so many girls were clearly exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after repeated sexual assaults—and no one thought to question what they’d been through. It created this added layer of discrimination against these girls. The injustice was so deep, and no one called what happened rape or incest or sexual assault. If it was acknowledged that there was a problem at home, rather than address the perpetrator, Samarcand became a place to send the girls who were victims of assault, effectively punishing them for something horrible that happened to them.

  Rewire: Was Samarcand an example of how white womanhood is placed on a pedestal and the lengths people will go to uphold and protect this idealized version of white Southern womanhood, or is it more of an example of what happens to young women who don’t conform to very particular ideas of what womanhood should look like?

  KZ: I think it’s both. White Southern womanhood is this ideal that so many were desperate to meet because it had huge implications for the preservation of the white race. They would do anything—including isolate, segregate, quarantine, and sterilize young white girls—just to uphold the ideal.

  But ultimately what I’m really trying to talk about here is the fluidity of white supremacy. In the effort to defend the “purity of whiteness,” white supremacists often disagreed with one another about the mechanisms for doing so. “Whiteness” appeared to be a fixed category, but Victorian reformers and mental hygienists disagreed sharply on the treatment of poor white girls who did not meet the purity ideals. I hope this encourages more dialogue about the construction of whiteness and the dangers of it.

  Rewire: Do you think any of the themes surrounding your book or any themes around Samarcand are present in today’s culture and how we view womanhood?

  KZ: I think that our concerns today really revolve around the control of women’s reproductive choices. I hope we can think about the ways white supremacists in the past justified the control of women’s bodies. What we see today is another iteration of that.

  Why do states invest so much in attempting to control women’s bodies, and for what reasons? What populations of women are most impacted? These are important questions. Why does the state enforce laws to control women’s sexuality? We see it all the time. We should know the motivations and justifications that people have used in the past to restrict women’s sexuality. The lessons of Samarcand hopefully will empower us to better understand our world today.

  This interview was conducted by email and by phone. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory
Pamela Tyler
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p729+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory. By Karin L. Zipf. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2016. Pp. xiv, 242. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-6249-1.)

Society's idea of what constitutes a "bad girl" has changed radically, as Karen L. Zipf's study of North Carolina's Samarcand Manor demonstrates. During the period covered in her study, roughly from World War I through the 1940s, truancy, fighting, drinking, or merely running away could have landed a North Carolina white girl in the state juvenile reformatory. However, the primary offense of "inmates" was any variety of sexual delinquency, chiefly premarital sex, whether or not for money, including even victims of incest. A desire to reform any hint of sexual deviance among white girls underlay Samarcand's creation in 1917. So intent on its mission of maintaining proper white womanhood, the state abandoned due process and civil liberties. Girls arrested and charged (but not tried and convicted) in juvenile court could be committed by a majority vote of a five-person board of managers, to serve up to three years, with discharge granted not by a court but by that board. Disciplinary measures at the reformatory were so harsh that it is hard not to conclude that being sentenced to Samarcand constituted being sentenced to child abuse. At last, in 1931, the girls' misery led to arson as over a dozen residents set fires that destroyed two dormitories at the institution.

Zipf skillfully traces views of sexuality and purity, the workings of the juvenile justice system, and conflicting ideas held by clubwomen, social workers, and government officials about the possibilities of reforming "bad girls." After recounting the arson trial and the disastrous strategy of the girls' defense attorney--who shifted her focus from the state's failure to serve its Samarcand inmates wisely or well to a defense that characterized the girls as "clinically feebleminded"--Zipf addresses shocking policy changes underpinned by the "science" of eugenics, which eventually led to the sterilization of 293 Samarcand girls over a period of two decades (p. 2).

Zipf has made impressive use of state records as well as manuscript sources and newspapers to construct a fascinating narrative. However, her assertion that racial motives underlay policy decisions seems an unwarranted reliance on the trope of whiteness. Samarcand girls were disadvantaged in many ways, hailing from neglectful or dysfunctional families, often turning early to sex in search of love, often abused, and often infected with venereal diseases. They were far from "pure"; in the parlance of the times, they were "fallen" (p. 7). Zipf posits that the horror of "interracial sexual liaisons" motivated the state to intervene in their lives "to save the white stock" (p. 73). Was sex across the color line a problem? In 191 pages of text, replete with case history details, Zipf provides but one instance of interracial sex, noting that a white North Carolina girl "bore four illegitimate children, 'one of which ... was a mulatto'" (p. 82). She alleges that Kate Burr Johnson, the state commissioner of public welfare, aimed to have Samarcand "preserve the natural superiority and purity of the white race," but Zipf provides no evidence (such as quotations from Johnson's papers, for example) to support the assertion that concerns about race motivated Johnson (pp. 85-86). Were considerations of whiteness actually at the heart of Samarcand's mission? Did the state really see these delinquents as not white and thus "treated this class as another race" (p. 161; emphasis added)? Peter Kolchin sagely cautions our profession against "overreliance on whiteness in explaining the American past," rightly noting that "Americans have had many ways of looking down on people without questioning their whiteness" ("Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America," Journal of American History, 89 [June 2002), 157, 165). One doubts that even the "bad girls at Samarcand" lost their white privilege completely in preWorld War II North Carolina.

Pamela Tyler

University of Southern Mississippi

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tyler, Pamela. "Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 729+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078173/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1c02c950. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078173

Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919
W.J. Rorabaugh
40.2 (Winter 2006): p531+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Oxford University Press
https://academic.oup.com/journals
Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919. By Karin L. Zipf (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xi plus 207 pp.).

Under colonial American custom and law, apprenticeship was both a means by which one generation passed skilled crafts to the next and a means by which court-approved parental substitutes raised poor, and especially fatherless, children. Each type of apprenticeship was distinct. Whereas parents privately contracted with masters for craft apprenticeships, which required that youths be given an education and taught a trade, poor children under court-ordered apprenticeships did not necessarily get an education and could be assigned to such "trades" as housewifery, which might qualify poor girls to become house servants. By the 1830s formal indented craft apprentices were increasingly rare in the United States, but the courts, often without regard to parental opinion, continued to bind poor free boys and girls as "apprentices." Not surprisingly, actual practices also often involved race and gender issues. In Maryland and Delaware "apprenticeship" had been used in conjunction with widespread voluntary manumission in the 1790s and early 1800s as a device to retain social control of young African Americans, and before the Civil War poor free black parents in the South often had their children bound without consent. When slavery ended in 1865, planters tried to impose a new system of apprenticeship on their youthful ex-slaves.

Most of Karin Zipf's study focuses on race-based "apprenticeship" in North Carolina during Reconstruction, especially from 1865 to 1867. The twists and turns in apprenticeship during this short period reveal much about shifting beliefs, practices, and policies concerning race, gender, and class, which are the author's greatest concerns. While Zipf makes ample use of the few scattered court-ordered indentures for poor children that have survived, it is sometimes difficult to judge the degree to which the surviving documents are representative. Except for heavily Quaker Guilford County (Greensboro), the number of cases in other counties is often too small to draw confident conclusions. Local customs varied considerably, and county judges sometimes acted contrary to law. To compensate for lack of local records, Zipf makes a fine use of the Freedmen's Bureau records for 1865 to 1867. However, what gives this book its punch is the excellent analysis of a handful of key North Carolina Supreme Court cases about apprenticeship and related matters extending from 1867 to 1924. These cases enable Zipf, who is both a lawyer and a historian, to show that the shifting legal results are derived from gradual widespread changes in social attitudes not only about apprenticeship but also about race, gender, and class.

In the aftermath of emancipation in 1865, North Carolina planters used local courts to indent to themselves their underage former slaves. State law did not require parental permission for such apprenticeships. It merely required the court to find that the parent or parents were not suitable persons to maintain and educate the children. Also, the state could apprentice any child who was born outside marriage, and in 1865 planters argued that anyone born a slave had been born outside marriage. The Freedmen's Bureau was uneasy about apprenticeships that looked like slavery, and this concern increased after black parents complained in large numbers about children seized in midnight raids on their homes. While Freedmen had trouble reclaiming children, single Freedwomen were in a particularly poor legal position to regain custody, since both law and custom were based upon patriarchy.

In 1867 in the Ambrose case, the North Carolina Supreme Court, in an opinion written by a Republican justice, revoked court-ordered indentures that had been made without the apprentice being in court. Although the case was decided on narrow grounds, the decision nullified thousands of apprenticeships that had been created after the war. While some Freedmen's Bureau agents allowed local courts to re-indent apprentices with parental notification, other agents insisted on parental permission. The head of the Freedmen's Bureau in the state adopted this latter policy. It was common custom in North Carolina, although not found in any statute, that a white child could only be apprenticed above the age of fourteen with parental consent, because the child was of an age where he or she could contribute to family income.

After the Ambrose decision, courts often granted black fathers custody of children, but father's rights did not help single black mothers. Zipf is quite good on showing how contemporary notions of female domesticity, based upon the concept of the white middle-class lady, were transferred gradually to both white and black working-class women in the late nineteenth century. The Victorian concept of female virtue helped women in custody cases, and in 1872 the North Carolina Supreme Court in the Mitchell case gave single women the right to retain their children without mandatory court-ordered apprenticeship so long as they demonstrated good character and did not become public charges.

After 1900 society, reformers, and courts increasingly put the child's welfare first. The state also grew more powerful as patriarchy waned. Institutions such as reform schools, operated on the basis of segregation, replaced court-ordered apprenticeship. Masters had often neglected to educate apprentices, and the new mass institutions, staffed by skilled bureaucrats, served poor children better. Putting the child's welfare first also favored mothers over fathers, especially in custody cases involving young children. In 1923 the North Carolina Supreme Court in Clegg v. Clegg gave a husband three-quarters custody after a couple had separated. Mrs. Clegg testified that the husband had used the Ku Klux Klan to threaten her. The KKK was hostile to any challenge to white male Protestant patriarchy. Mrs. Clegg's main offense, in the eyes of the Klan, was that she intended to take away one son, who would not henceforth be brought up in the manly ways of the Klan. A year later, Mrs. Clegg sued after her husband had abandoned the children to his sister. Mrs. Clegg won three-quarters custody. By then court-ordered apprenticeship was dead. The North Carolina legislature had ended apprenticeship in 1919.

Zipf's useful study of court-ordered apprenticeship of poor children is especially strong on the early Reconstruction period and makes a thorough use of legal records.

W. J. Rorabaugh

University of Washington, Seattle

Rorabaugh, W.J.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rorabaugh, W.J. "Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919." Journal of Social History, vol. 40, no. 2, 2006, p. 531+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A157081671/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c1a8ff0e. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A157081671

Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919
James Marten
72.2 (May 2006): p447+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919. By Karin L. Zipf. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 207. $42.95, ISBN 0-8071-3045-1.)

Traditional apprenticeship agreements--the kind that Benjamin Franklin famously broke when he fled Boston as a boy to make his fortune in Philadelphia--stipulated that boys would learn trades while they provided labor for their masters. The apprenticeships described in this book, however, considered apprentices to be simple laborers and were invoked if a parent was unable, in the opinion of the court, to take care of his or her son or daughter or if a child was orphaned and left without any visible means of support.

This study of the ways in which forced apprenticeships evolved to match attitudes about race, gender, and class clearly shows that freedom and childhood are constructs with fluid and often contradictory meanings. Karin L. Zipf traces that evolution through nearly two centuries and four major phases. During the first phase, which lasted from the early eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth century, the white patriarchy ensured that the children of single or widowed women of both races and of African American men would be subject to forced apprenticeship. The second phase developed in the 1850s, when the courts stepped up their efforts to limit the rights of black parents. Phase three, which took root during Reconstruction, generally eliminated race as a factor in determining which children were subject to apprenticeship but continued to discriminate against single mothers of both races. Through the first three phases, the courts insisted that the primary rights under consideration when a child's status was to be determined belonged either to the state or to the father. Beginning in the 1890s, "child savers" committed to the newfound notion that children also had rights replaced the creaky old apprenticeship system and its white patriarchy with a model of state paternalism that created a child welfare program comprising juvenile courts, a child labor law, and compulsory education.

Zipf effectively presents her primary themes: that "apprenticeship was a constantly evolving system of social control" and that "power relations in apprenticeship law were not static but rather constantly contested and reinterpreted by white and black North Carolinians" (p. 5). Along the way, she reveals the ways in which the blunt, inflexible language of the law and the heavy-handed intersection of race, gender, and legal systems were unequipped to deal with the subtleties of family dynamics and the varied needs of children.

This is, of course, a legal history, and the following suggestions may appear to be a case of wanting the author to have written a slightly different book. Be that as it may, Zipf could have enhanced the relevance of her book by integrating the evolution of the ways in which North Carolina judges, parents, and politicians constructed childhood between the early eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. She does a much better job of establishing changing ideas about race and gender. But the rich histories of children and of attitudes about childhood are generally missing. Nevertheless, this is a useful examination of the legal status of children and of parents that, indeed, "serves as a metaphor for power relations in nineteenth-century North Carolina" (p. 5).

JAMES MARTEN

Marquette University

Marten, James

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Marten, James. "Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919." Journal of Southern History, vol. 72, no. 2, 2006, p. 447+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A146628861/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9ee08eb8. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A146628861

Zipf, Karin L.: Bad girls at Samarcand: sexuality and sterilization in a southern juvenile reformatory
J.E. Anderson
54.2 (Oct. 2016): p275+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Zipf, Karin L. Bad girls at Samarcand: sexuality and sterilization in a southern juvenile reformatory. Louisiana State, 2016. 242p bibl index afp ISBN 9780807162491 cloth, $39.95; ISBN 9780807162507 ebook, $39.95

54-0868

HV9105

2015-35731

MARC

Zipf (history, East Carolina Univ.) offers an account of the early decades of North Carolina's Samarcand Manor (State Home and Industrial School for Girls), founded in 1918. Framing her analysis around the arson trials following a number of inmates' destruction of two dormitories in March 1931, Zipf skillfully delineates the tensions among founders, staff, state bureaucrats, and the general community, rooted in differing beliefs about white girls' reformability. Samarcand's first superintendent, Agnes MacNaughton, viewed Samarcand as a site for shaping victimized girls into southern white ladyhood, a position complicated by Samarcand's acceptance of federal funds designated to help control venereal disease. Grace Robson, a mental hygienist who favored intelligence testing and classification, replaced McNaughton in 1934. Robson aligned Samarcand with the eugenics movement, with selected inmates judged to be "defective" or feebleminded and beyond rehabilitation funneled toward sterilization. One wishes for more of the girls' own views on class and racial identity, likely unavailable because of the legal limitations on juvenile records, noted in the introduction, and a relevant concern for those researching girls' institutional lives. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--J. E. Anderson, Georgia State University

Anderson, J.E.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Anderson, J.E. "Zipf, Karin L.: Bad girls at Samarcand: sexuality and sterilization in a southern juvenile reformatory." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2016, p. 275+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A479869088/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=49b29e94. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A479869088

Karin Zipf continues to break standards for women in history
(Oct. 4, 2017): p1.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Uloop Inc.
http://uwire.com/?s=UWIRE+Text&x=26&y=14&=Go
Byline: Jenna Price

There are few people as energetic and vibrant as Karin Zipf, a history professor at East Carolina University and published author. Every sentence she speaks contains a punch of information and paints a colorful picture of history. A picture that doesn't exclude women.

Though Zipf specializes in gender, sexuality and race relations in the late 19th century and early 20th century in the American South, Zipf recently published a successful book called "Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory."

In Zipf's new book, she discusses the mistreatment of women in an institution known as Samarcand located in Jackson Springs, North Carolina. She said she first became interested in Samarcand while she was studying a court case that involved 16 of the inmates at the institution. The inmates set fire to two of the dormitories, and were all facing the death penalty. Zipf said, however, she was more interested in what would motivate these girls to set fire to two of the dormitories. Zipf exposes the mistreatment of these women and paints a picture of how poor and delinquent white women were mistreated at Samarcand.

Zipf hadn't always known she wanted to be a historian. She said the first time she recalls being fascinated by history was in her high school history class.

"The first person I would credit would be my 11th grade history teacher, Mrs. Wilson," Zipf said. "One thing I remember so clearly was when she brought in a friend of hers that had fought in the Vietnam War. I suddenly realized that the textbook just was not all there was and that learning about history through the primary source was so much more interesting."

Senior Katie Chandler, a history, philosophy, great books and religious studies major, is a former student of Zipf. Chandler said Zipf's classes are impactful and meaningful, adding that Zipf is a vibrant force on campus and students are lucky to have her.

"She definitely had a pretty big impact on me," Chandler said. "In a field dominated by men it was nice to have such an open and approachable woman. She speaks to you like an equal."

During her undergraduate studies at Wake Forest University, she had the opportunity to research a campaign for white supremacy that took place in Wilmington, North Carolina. This was Zipf's first time working with a primary source, and said it helped her to realize how much people didn't know about history. It was during this experience that Zipf decided to become a historian.

Zipf said her learning environment wasn't always the best while in graduate school at the University of Georgia.

"It was really, really, really tough and I was in a weird environment because there were almost no woman at all in the program or the department," she said. "They forbid me from taking women's studies classes, and I thought that meant I couldn't take interdisciplinary courses."

Despite people trying to keep her from learning and exploring such topics as gender and sexuality, she said she rose above them and succeeded.

"They seemed to have this discomfort including women in the politics and things," Zipf said. "It just became a mission that I was going to address women in history because they didn't want me too."

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Karin Zipf continues to break standards for women in history." UWIRE Text, 4 Oct. 2017, p. 1. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A508066824/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f2afd336. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A508066824

Tyler, Pamela. "Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 729+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078173/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1c02c950. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017. Rorabaugh, W.J. "Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919." Journal of Social History, vol. 40, no. 2, 2006, p. 531+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A157081671/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c1a8ff0e. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017. Marten, James. "Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919." Journal of Southern History, vol. 72, no. 2, 2006, p. 447+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A146628861/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9ee08eb8. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017. Anderson, J.E. "Zipf, Karin L.: Bad girls at Samarcand: sexuality and sterilization in a southern juvenile reformatory." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2016, p. 275+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A479869088/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=49b29e94. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017. "Karin Zipf continues to break standards for women in history." UWIRE Text, 4 Oct. 2017, p. 1. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A508066824/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f2afd336. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.

• H-Histsex
  https://networks.h-net.org/node/6056/reviews/139209/adjarian-zipf-bad-girls-samarcand-sexuality-and-sterilization-southern
  Word count: 1776

  Adjarian on Zipf, 'Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory'
  Author:
  Karin L. Zipf
  Reviewer:
  M. M. Adjarian

  Karin L. Zipf. Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 2016. 242 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-6249-1.

  Reviewed by M. M. Adjarian (St. Edward's University, Austin)
  Published on H-Histsex (August, 2016)
  Commissioned by Chiara Beccalossi

  The Sexual Politics of Eugenics, Southern Style

  One of the grimmest episodes in the history of eugenics in the United States took place in North Carolina. Between 1920 and 1950, the state forced hundreds of young girls and women to undergo compulsory—and sometimes nonconsensual—sterilization. In Bad Girls at Samarcand, Louisiana State University historian Karin L. Zipf explores how the American eugenics movement, which had given rise to sterilization programs as early as the 1890s, became intertwined with public policy debates in the 1930s regarding regulation of North Carolina juvenile detention centers for girls.

  Zipf centers her study on the social, political and juridical events involved in the history of Samarcand, a reformatory for girls. She begins the story in 1917 and focuses on the controversy that raged between reformers and social workers over how to deal with juvenile delinquents. Social Gospel-influenced reformers like Hope Summerell Chamberlain and social workers like Kate Burr Johnson and Martha P. Falconer—(who called themselves “mental hygienists,” p. 3) operated on the racist assumption that such a reformatory should be for whites only. While none among them questioned that the care of young female delinquents resided with the state, one lone critic, a registered nurse named Birdie Dunn, did contend that juvenile detention centers should come under local rather than state control.

  The reformers ultimately won this debate. But in a twist of historical irony, the money used to fund construction of Samarcand came from federal sources that criminalized prostitution. In response to a US government campaign to protect WWI soldiers from venereal disease, North Carolina passed laws that criminalized prostitution. The North Carolina State Board of Health then enforced those laws by sending convicted prostitutes to Samarcand. So from the very start of its problematic existence, Samarcand became home to young girls and women who became further “tainted” by forced association with prostitutes.

  Zipf argues that this forced marriage of ideals and political expedience transformed Samarcand into a space riven by competing ideologies of womanhood. On the one hand, Southern reformers held that female redemption and the recuperation of lost “ladyhood” was possible due to the “natural” superiority of the white race. On the other hand, US military officials—who tended to view women according to the Victorian virgin/whore dichotomy—believed that convicted prostitutes were bearers of disease and not worth redemption. If southern white girls could be raised up again by virtue of the their race, to make them live with adult streetwalkers deemed beyond help defeated the purpose of reform.

  Most of the girls who came to Samarcand had records that included everything from simple misdemeanors to hard-core felonies. Some also came with pre-existing social and/or mental disorders and diseases. What connected them was the fact that “they had witnessed, suffered from or participated in nearly every social transgression” possible (p. 45). This made living up to the goals set for the reformatory—to transform every girl into a properly submissive and genteel southern lady—difficult. Zipf shows how Samarcand administrators responded to this challenge by creating complex systems of reward and punishment. Girls who obeyed the rules gained privileges denied to their more incorrigible sisters, who became subject to staff-sanctioned acts of cruelty like confinement and whippings.

  While these events were occurring at Samarcard, increasingly favorable attitudes toward eugenics began reshaping public policy toward juvenile—and especially white female—delinquents. At the same time, attitudes toward women became more complex. The 1920s saw the rise of what Zipf describes as two major models of womanhood: the independent Progressive Era “new woman” and the sexually liberated Jazz Age flapper. In the South, these models came to reside alongside that of the southern lady, which continued to serve as a symbol of white racial purity. Zipf contends that these models of womanhood forced young girls, including the delinquents at Samarcand, to navigate numerous contradictions as they forged their own identities. Middle- and upper-class women were far more successful at combining these identities. This was largely because they treated independence or sexiness as fashionable poses which were monitored by husbands, fathers, or families so as not to exceed the bounds of social acceptability.

  By contrast, lower-class girls and women had far less leeway with regard to their behavior largely because they lacked the resources to safely and successfully “pose.” Zipf offers the example of girls who often decided to exercise their independence and/or sexual freedom by running away or by choosing to live a life on the streets. Unlike their middle-class counterparts, however, delinquent girls’ “bad” behavior was often pathologized, even if that behavior had roots in rape, incest or other crimes that took advantage of their social and economic vulnerability. Considered emotionally unstable, these girls were deemed to require psychiatric intervention and/or institutionalization. Whiteness did not help them: their class and the stereotypes that went with it guaranteed that they would not be treated like southern ladies.

  Zipf’s detailed discussions of the expectations and attitudes towards and pressures on young white female delinquents suggest that a major crisis at Samarcand was inevitable. That crisis took the form of an act of arson that destroyed two buildings in March of 1931. In the legal proceedings that followed, Zipf speculates that the sixteen girls held accountable for the fire likely felt immune from severe punishment because of their whiteness. But because officials and institutions viewed them as “disorderly women” (p. 105) with tarnished reputations and criminal proclivities, that protection was denied them. North Carolina had not executed women between 1910 and 1930, and the death penalty had rarely been used on females. Yet Zipf suggests that the outcome of this trial—which included imprisonment for most of the girls—was never entirely certain.

  At the same time, she also shows how the girls’ defense lawyer, Nell Battle Lewis, chose to present her clients as victims of an unforgiving system that neglected their individual needs. Near the end and after several girls tried to set fire to the prisons where they were housed during the trial—she turned to expert testimony and psychological test results to prove the girls were mental defectives rather than rational, self-determining individuals. Though likely motivated by compassion, Zipf suggests thatLewis' arguments ultimately fed into a current of thinking about reform that called for eugenics-based reform solutions at juvenile detention centers.

  After the 1931 trial, fierce public debate concerning how to best reform delinquent white girls ensued. Some North Carolinians believed that the girls’ (racially) inherent redeemable qualities merited a thorough investigation of Samarcand and its methods of discipline. But others believed that the girls were mental defectives who could not be reformed and who needed to be kept apart from other whites to avoid contaminating the gene pool. While the controversy raged outside of Samarcand, its superintendent, Agnes MacNaughton, fought a losing battle to keep her system of discipline in place. By 1933, she was replaced by a mental hygienist, Grace M. Robson, who favored practices that included inmate sterilization.

  By the time these changes occurred at Samarcand, the North Carolina legislature had not only dispensed with the need for a governor’s signature but had also transferred the decision-making process to the Eugenics Board, itself part of the State Board of Welfare. A 1935 law went into place granting more power to institutional committees that classified inmates according to mental abilities and degree of sexual activity. The result was a significant increase in the number of individuals—and especially white females—who were sterilized in North Carolina. Between 1929 and 1950, of the more than 2,500 total sterilizations performed statewide (half of which were on girls between ten and nineteen years old) 293 were done on Samarcand inmates (p. 154).

  Zipf suggests that for all their powerlessness, delinquent girls were still able to manipulate a reform system that not only mistreated them but also imposed far stricter behavioral standards on females than on males. She observes that harsh as jail conditions were, delinquent girls brought to court often argued for jail sentences rather than life in a reformatory. As detention center inmates, they would remain virtual prisoners for indefinite—rather than specified—periods of time and avoid the possibility of later transfer to a women’s reformatory. Zipf further speculates that the girls used rumors of masturbation, sodomy and lesbianism—all of which reinforced the connection between non-heteronormativity with delinquency—to convince sentencing judges that prison was the better alternative. Indeed, they may have even argued that places like Samarcand transformed them into the opposite of the chaste, upstanding southern ladies the reform system intended they become.

  This cultural history of the inner workings of a female juvenile reformatory in the early to mid-twentieth century South is as readable as it is well researched. Zipf renders the players in the Samarcand story—from major figures to the girls themselves—in thoughtful, at times even novelistic detail. Zipf’s work is also praiseworthy for the way it carefully pieces together an informative and engrossing narrative using only public sources of information such as court documents and state records, which Zipf verifies throughout against newspaper accounts and manuscript collections from the 1920s to the 1940s.

  Scholars from a broad range of disciplines, including history, sociology, criminal justice, public policy and women’s studies, are sure to find this book an excellent addition to the body of work that not only addresses eugenics and how it was practiced in the United States but also the degree to which state institutions in the South were impacted by conflicting—and conflicted—ideologies about race, class, and gender. Because the text concerns youths in the prison system, researchers interested in addressing current debates on the funding of rehabilitation programs for young offenders will also find the book as useful as it is enlightening.

  Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=46672

  Citation: M. M. Adjarian. Review of Zipf, Karin L., Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory. H-Histsex, H-Net Reviews. August, 2016.
  URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46672

• News & Observer
  http://www.newsobserver.com/entertainment/books/article85244932.html
  Word count: 686

  ECU professor’s book offers terrifying look at how NC treated vulnerable children

  By David Cecelski

  Correspondent

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  June 25, 2016 01:05 PM

  UPDATED June 25, 2016 01:05 PM

  Karin Zipf’s “Bad Girls at Samarcand” is an enlightening book, but also a frightening one. It gives a terrifying look at the history of how the state of North Carolina has treated some of its most vulnerable children over the last century: those girls denied love at home, traumatized by incest and rape, living on the streets, or scorned for being somehow “different.”

  Zipf is a history professor at East Carolina University, and she focuses her story on a state reform school called Samarcand Manor in Eagles Springs, not far from Pinehurst in Moore County.

  Her story begins in 1917. Appalled by 19th century policies that consigned “fallen girls” to the streets or adult prisons, social reformers convinced the N.C. General Assembly to support a statewide reform school for white girls, age 9 to 16.

  “Our training is to wipe out the past and make the girl feel that her future is hers to make of it what she will,” Agnes McNaughton, Samarcand’s first superintendent, stated.
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  The need was great. To mention just one example, Zipf describes a Samarcand girl who had gone to work at a cotton mill when she was 10 years old. She had her first child, to a married man, at age 12. Shunned by family and neighbors, the girl took refuge in a drifters’ camp and “made her living in the only way she saw open to her.”

  Many of the girls had been charged with prostitution, theft or vagrancy, but some had done nothing at all.

  Consider the case of Margaret Abernethy. She was at Samarcand for 2 1/2 years because her father had sexually abused her and the state had nowhere else to put her.

  Or consider “Mildred” from Parkton. A stranger came into her bedroom at night and abducted and raped her. Her parents sent her to Samarcand for not protecting her chastity better, while her rapist went free.

  Others were sent to Samarcand simply for sexual promiscuity, or what we would call “premarital sex.” Such cases revealed the dizzying double standard behind Samarcand’s existence. No male would have been punished for that kind of sexual activity, much less deprived his liberty.

  Zipf is far less prone to speculate than I am. But reading between the lines, I suspected that some of the girls were sent to Samarcand for having sex with the “wrong” kind of person, perhaps another girl or, even more taboo at the time, an African-American boy.

  Throughout its history, the institution was dogged by sex scandals and reports of child abuse. A deep bitterness smoldered among many of the girls, and in 1931 literally burst into flames: a riot broke out and the girls burned two school buildings to the ground.

  Things grew grimmer yet. In 1933, state leaders embraced a eugenics policy that sanctioned sterilization as a way to maintain racial purity. Over four decades, the state forcibly sterilized over 8,000 young women and girls, including hundreds at Samarcand.

  As Zipf points out, the state’s sterilization law of 1933 praised and closely resembled Nazi Germany’s.

  Samarcand finally closed in 2011, and our lawmakers in Raleigh have been dismantling the state’s reform school system. But in this poignant and moving book’s final pages, Zipf strikes a crucial cautionary note.

  She warns us that if the state fails to provide adequate funding for community-based alternatives for juvenile offenders and prevention programs for high-risk youth, we’ll be right back where we started a century ago, when many of our children grew up in adult prisons or walked the streets.

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