Policing Sex in the Sunflower State: The Story of the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fractures of our society and of its infrastructure social inequalities in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and class;discrepancies in healthcare structures;the lack of a social safety net;and the discriminating operation of law enforcement structures such as the prison system. Perry pursues questions about the history of female imprisonment, womens legal rights, and the restriction of their sexual behavior through state regulation in Kansas during and after World War I. The author critically analyzes the origins of female incarceration under Chapter 205 at the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women as the result of the states attempt to respond to the outbreak of venereal diseases in the military. Perry thus provides keen insights in the understanding of gendered law enforcement for women in the Great Plains by interweaving meticulously researched historical facts about the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women with the analysis of over two thousand interviews with inmates from 1923 to 1933, which chronicle how the state's interference in its citizens' lives reached far beyond the initial period of World War I. Policing Sex in the Sunflower State is a most welcome addition to the scholarship of rural sexuality and gender studies because it centers the untold lived experiences of incarcerated women during the interwar period.