Occupation Schoolgirl: Black Girls at Saint Elizabeths Hospital in the Interwar Period

Rebekka Michaelsen, University of California Los Angeles

During the Progressive Era, the concurrent discourses of “the menace of the feebleminded” and “the girl problem” facilitated the medical incarceration of Black girls at Saint Elizabeths Hospital, a federal institution for the insane in Washington. D.C. Most historical inquiries into psychiatry treat “insanity” as an adult concern, conceptualizing institutions for the insane as adult spaces. Scholars have analyzed the Child Guidance movement of the early twentieth century as a precursor to child psychiatry, but the stories of children who ended up medically incarcerated alongside adults in institutions not designed for their care have largely yet to be told. My dissertation, “Southern Black Girlhood and Mental Disability, 1840-1940,” reads surviving patient case files from admissions in 1920, 1925, and 1930 to recover Black girls’ experiences at Saint Elizabeths Hospital in the interwar period. Emulating Black feminist archival methodologies, the project writes a history with and against an archive designed to pathologize and criminalized Black girls, prioritizing as much as possible the voices (or performances) of Black girls without reproducing the violence inherent in the production of these institutional records. The project defines “girl” with chronological age (eighteen or younger) and/or wardship status (a girl committed to the Board of Children’s Guardians aged out of supervision on her twenty-first birthday). Historians of childhood and youth have debated to what extent Black girls experienced girlhood in the era of Jim Crow given the ubiquity of child labor, lack of access to education, and omnipresent threats of sexual harassment and violence. During Jim Crow, white supremacists often referred to adult Black women as “girl” to disrespect and diminish Black women, however clinicians’ description of young female patients as “girls” appear to signal recognition of patients’ girlhood rather than any derogatory intent.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 35. Finding Children and Youth in the Archives I