“Good Imitator. Can Use a Needle”: Domesticity as Discipline Within Spaces of Eugenic Containment

In a small photograph from around 1910, a teenaged girl proudly perches behind her workstation. Wearing a giant hair bow that peeps from behind the wings of her Gibson-girl bouffant, the girl’s small body is partially obscured by a Singer sewing machine. This touching photo served as the frontispiece for Henry Herbert Goddard’s infamous eugenic family study, The Kallikaks: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. Published in 1912, Goddard illustrated his text with photographs where he posed Emma in the familiar poses of idealized Victorian girlhood: behind the sewing machine, reading a novel, enjoying a hayride with her peers. These images served as a subtle warning to his readers: Her danger lay in her very ability to pass as normal amidst the broader American population—a population that was increasingly in danger of becoming fearfully degenerated.

Despite the conventional pose, Emma is not pictured within the warm bosom of a family home. Instead, she was photographed in the workroom of the Vinland Home for the Feeble Minded, where she was incarcerated beginning at the age of 8. She, like many thousands of other young people at the turn of the twentieth century, would come to be interpellated into a vast, medicalized system that conscripted large swathes of the American population, mostly culled from the lower- and working-classes, as medically unfit to reproduce. Thinking carefully about how women like Emma, marked by society as unclean and unfit, experienced the institutions in which they lived as home, as private sites of domestic labor, training, learning, and other quotidian cares, and, conversely, as sites of medical incursion, state violence, and public interference and surveillance, requires that we take seriously the unbearable logic of asylums-- environments which, for a brief time after their utopian inceptions, operated as eerie doubles to the private home.