Social Control and Social Inequalities in the Implementation of Venereal Disease Laws in Kansas, 1923-1933

• In Event: 371 - Regular Session. Deviance and Social Control

Abstract

In 1917, the state of Kansas passed a state quarantine law, Chapter 205, which allowed authorities to detain people with venereal disease. The law was enforced along lines of gender and class, with poor women being imprisoned at the Women’s Industrial Farm (WIF) in Lansing, Kansas throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The WIF thus served as an institution of social control, imprisoning women whose sexual behaviors violated social norms. This research examines inmate interviews for women who were detained under Chapter 205 between the years of 1923-1933 (N=488), seeking to understand the ways in which the law was actually implemented. Recent work on social control and public health has highlighted various modes of social control and suggested ways in which the implementation of such policies reflects larger social inequalities. As I will show, three modes of social control emerge from the inmate interviews: 1). Formal social control, where representatives of the state directly intervened in women’s lives; 2). Indirect informal social control, where family members and acquaintances notified authorities that a woman was a venereal disease suspect; and 3). “Care and control,” where women volunteered to go to the Farm in order to access healthcare services. All three of these modes of control demonstrate the ways in which existing social hierarchies informed and were reproduced by the implementation of Chapter 205. This attention to the intersection of social control and social inequalities is key to preventing modern public health campaigns from recreating the injustices of the past.

Author

• Nicole Perry, University of Kansas