“Six Blacks from Home”: Childhood, Motherhood, and Eugenics in America

Abstract

In August 1919, a settlement house worker in Columbus, Ohio, filed a complaint in juvenile court against a seven-year-old girl whom I will call “Marie.” The complaint read, “Marie runs the streets continually. She is very irregular in her attendance at school, and is as dirty as a pig. She has been found in a lumber yard with a negro, and it was alleged by her associates that he raped her there. She goes into stores and begs.” According to the surviving records, Marie's “truancies from home” alerted settlement workers to the case. As a young child she reportedly began staying out late at night and loitering in the company of men and boys, and was threatened with being put out of the house when she was found alone with the African American man. By 1928, after Marie became an unwed mother at the age of sixteen, and had spent nine years in and out of child welfare institutions, a summary report contained the interesting typographical error that Marie's young life had strayed a distance of “six blacks from home.” As incidental as slipping “blocks” into “blacks” may have been in one sense, it captured a powerful truth. Marie violated key boundaries of sexual, gender, and racial purity that made a woman a candidate for respectable motherhood, and she paid dearly for these transgressions.

Socialist and Eugenic: Czech Fairy-Tale Films and the Nation’s Health

“…Losing these qualities, together with losing their virginity, connects the heroines with the Man's figure, thus ensuring the transfer to a new progressive realm. In keeping with the common ideological contents and practicing self-referentiality, 2 the films illustrate the narrative of women's domesticity by emphasizing the role of a healthy romantic relationship -adopted and developed by many eugenicists and writers who participated in the dissemination of eugenics (Ryan 2007).…”

Achieving Juvenile Justice through Abolition: A Critical Review of Social Work’s Role in Shaping the Juvenile Legal System and Steps toward Achieving an Antiracist Future

“…This was an issue, because, at the time, social work was still finding its place as a profession, and the medical field was not only already established but also one of the most respected fields in the country. During the early stages of the juvenile legal system, the US eugenics movement was on the wake (Selden 2005;Ryan 2007). This led medical professionals in search of biological factors that could lead to delinquency.…”

“Safeguarding the Interests of the State” From Defective Delinquent Girls

“…149–162, 188–204). For historical treatments of other high‐grade defective girls, see Lunbeck (), Ryan (), and Rembis ().…”

“…This article seeks to develop understandings of mental classifications of slight intellectual defect, an underrepresented facet of this history. See especially Gould (), Zenderland (), Carson (), Ryan (), and Rembis ().…”

“…For a generalized treatment of the history of eugenics in the United States, see especially Kevles (), Tucker (), Ryan (), Largent (), Stern (), and Dorr (). On the history of the eugenics movement through the lens of gender analysis, see especially Larson (), Kline (), and Schoen ().…”