Project Background

Single sex reformatories emerged in the United States during the Progressive Era (~1890s-1920s), a time when reformers around the country were trying to come up with solutions to the percieved problems that industrialization, expanding cities, and a rapidly growing immigrant population were bringing. Women’s reformatories specifically grew out of increasing anxiety about working class women’s growing sexual autonomy as an indicator of a decline in society’s morals and a threat to a more general idea of “proper” womanhood that was rooted in maintaining a social norm that empowered white people and reinforced middle class ideas around domesticity.

Much as been written about the girls and women who were imprisoned in reformatories and expected to emerge “proper” ladies as a result of more education and domestic training, but there is a relatively small archival “footprint” of the girls and women themselves. As a result, this project specifically grounds itself in a photo album of girls at the Girls House of Refuge in Philadelphia because it contains a large number of girls’ photos and names, creating the rare opportunity to visually humanize this history. These images, in conjunction with a number of text documents, will get at some of the tension of agency and how people are represented in The Archive, but also help to complicate the simple stories told about these girls’ lives in the name of justifying their imprisonment and maintaining a social status quo.

Navigation and Interaction

Although there is a narrative aspect of this exhibit that would be best experienced by going through the images in order, I also want you to feel free to engage with the images that draw you the most. There will be questions accompanying each post, but please feel free to comment on the images themselves about what you wonder, what draws you, what this image evokes for you, etc.

*Note: Refresh the page, if after clicking to comment on an image, you would like to zoom out and view the whole image again.