Marcattilio-McCracken’s The Incorrigibles joins a growing collection of case studies of sterilization programs in school settings, demonstrating through its meticulous analysis that there is still much to uncover about how eugenic policies in the United States were actualized at the local level. Focusing on the Beloit Girls’ Industrial School (GIS) in Kansas, the book reveals (and this is perhaps its most striking finding) that the pathways to sterilization at the GIS were highly unpredictable, even seemingly arbitrary, yet deeply rooted in specific institutional dynamics and the state-level interpretation of eugenic ideologies. The school’s approach to forced sterilization illuminates the inconsistent application of these policies and demonstrates the vital role of localized studies in decoding the manifestations of eugenic policy across the country.
The book pursues two primary goals: first, to uncover the circumstances of Kansas’s sterilization policies, which were enacted upon over three thousand people in the state over fifty years; second, to chart what led many of the girls at the GIS to sterilization. The title The Incorrigibles draws from the most frequently cited reason girls were committed to the school— “incorrigibility,” a broad and malleable term used by GIS administrators that could mean anything from vagrancy to promiscuity, but ultimately meant that the girls’ behavior could not be controlled by their parents or schools and thus necessitated sending them to the specialized institution.
The book first explores Kansas’s eugenics and social welfare policies in the broader national context. Though Kansas ranked twenty-ninth in population in 1940, it ranked sixth in states with the largest number of forced sterilizations. This surprising statistic is explained through a deep dive into the state’s position at the forefront of Progressive Era reforms, which included widening state power in social welfare. Kansas’s embrace of hereditarianism mirrored the national scientific discourse but took on a local character, with Kansan researchers adopting these frameworks for their own studies and state-sponsored initiatives. The book explores these initiatives in its first two chapters, outlining events such as the eugenics exhibit at the Kansas Free Fair and an academic study titled The Kallikaks of Kansas, which warned Kansan officials of the “high grade feebleminded” or “born criminals” who were the recipients of the state’s social welfare apparatus (p. 41). Marcattilio-McCracken argues that these preoccupations with the supposed eugenic ills of Kansans would ultimately drive forced sterilizations in the state.
Chapter 3 discusses the GIS itself and the evolving understanding of delinquency among Kansan girls. Between the institution’s founding in 1888 and the 1930s, girls’ behaviors deemed inappropriate were increasingly understood as the result of hereditarian defect. This chapter also explores the pathways that brought girls to the GIS, what developments led them to be committed to the school, and how state officials understood their behaviors. Marcattilio-McCracken also speculates about how the girls themselves might have understood the state’s changing laws. In discussing the 1905 establishment of juvenile courts in each Kansas county, the author writes that “practically speaking of course, the girls sent to GIS had little sense of these changes; to them, a courtroom was a courtroom, a judge a judge, and an institution, an institution” (p. 59).
In its fourth chapter (titled “September 1935-June 1936”), the most powerful section of the book, Marcattilio-McCracken methodically examines the escalation of sterilization at GIS over that nine-month period, parsing through each of the conceivable justifications that the school’s superintendent might have relied upon to determine who was to be sterilized. But the data amassed by Marcattilio-McCracken refuses to yield one clear answer. The sterilized girls were likely not more “habitually criminal” than the others at the GIS, nor “feebleminded.” They likely weren’t sterilized solely because school officials sought to control their sexual impulses, as the GIS did not have the girls undergo procedures that altered their hormone production. An analysis of the demerit system used by the GIS does not reveal any concrete threshold or set of behaviors that marked a girl for sterilization. The author leans into the ambiguity of these sterilizations, rejecting any “strict narrative of punishment or eugenic sterilization,” and instead focusing on what was likely the superintendent’s personal charge, where “sterilization served the dual purpose to which she devoted her life: reforming the current generation of teenage delinquent defectives and preventing the next” (p. 128).
The final two chapters trace the aftermath of the sterilization scandal at the GIS and compare the Kansas case with sterilizations in industrial schools outside the state. The public outcry upon learning of the sterilizations led to leadership changes and policy shifts at the institution, which coincided with a broader national shift away from hereditarianism and toward thinking of juvenile delinquency as an issue of maladjustment. In the last chapter, Marcattilio-McCracken’s comparison of the GIS with similar schools in North Carolina and Minnesota underscores how the local particularities of each state’s interpretation and application of eugenics yielded different outcomes for similarly positioned girls. By situating this book within this growing chorus of case studies on industrial school sterilizations, the book offers a crucial lens through which we can comprehend the consequential inconsistencies in the application of eugenic ideologies nationwide.
Historians of education might be disappointed to find that the book falls short in its treatment of education or learning at the GIS, even though the institution was officially a school. There are intriguing hints about the quality and type of education girls may have received there. In his discussion of the girls’ intellectual abilities, the author shares state scholarship test results, which curiously reveal that the GIS tied or beat the state’s median in many subjects, even scoring among the top scores in the state in the subjects of history and government. Nonetheless, readers are left without an explanation of what classes looked like, or why the GIS girls scored particularly well. Marcattilio-McCracken does write that “unfortunately, for a school designed to efficiently and effectively rehabilitate girls who had wandered slightly off the path, the GIS did a better impression of a permanent juvenile detention center” (p. 116-17). Still, it’s unclear whether the reason for the absence of a discussion on education at GIS was that the institution did not truly have an educational mission or if this was not a subject of the author’s focus.
Still, the book is rich in fascinating detail, from illustrations of the Kansas State Fair’s Eugenics Building floor plan, to grade records of the GIS girls. The tables compiled by the author offer a concrete means of tracking the relationships between IQ scores, reasons for commitment, demerits, and eventual sterilizations, inviting readers to engage directly with the data. Marcattilio-McCracken’s work stands out for its nuanced analysis of the context-dependent outcomes of sterilization policies, showing how these ideologies were implemented unevenly, both between the GIS and other schools and even within the GIS. While highlighting these inconsistencies, The Incorrigibles serves as a sobering reminder of the lasting impact of eugenic ideologies, what it meant to put these ideas into action, and how such actions left indelible scars on these girls’ lives.
