This is a group photo of girls from the House of Refuge, pasted into the book next to a list of their names: (1) Grace Vile, (2) Theresa Kelley, (3) May Shee, (4) Edna Moore, (5) Leah Beckley, (6) Rosy Izzy, and (7) Lucy Clemens.

Similar to those pictured above, the vast majority of youth who entered reformatories like the Girl’s House of Refuge were racially white from poor, immigrant families. Because of the pre-existing networks that people had coming into the country and the fact that they often had to take up poorly paid work like rag-picking, immigrants were often relegated to the poorer, slum areas within cities and making the growing wealth gap between rich and poor more starkly visible. As a result, social reformers’ work within cities often drew upon nativist concerns about immigrants as over-populating and taking advantage of U.S. cities which led them to view the adults as already “contaminated” but their children as still potentially salvageable. These poor, racially white, American-born daughters, then embodied anxieties rooted in the disruption of what it should mean to be American, a white woman, and experiencing the “American dream.”

For the most part, Black youth were not allowed in reformatories for white youth and were placed in custodial institutions from the beginning. Even when separate reformatories were created, their purpose was not to reform but rather to reinforce a subservient social position through the gendered menial and domestic work that was expected to contribute to the reformation of white youth.

 

Questions

What tension arises from our perspective of the observer (via the camera) and that of the subjects (the girls)? What can we imagine their gaze says?

How can agency be found in a photo like this?

What narratives about femininity/womanhood are communities through this image?