Book Review

Canada and the United States

This is a first-rate study of the life of Miriam Van Waters that, like the best of the new biographies (Kathryn Kish Sklar's work on Florence Kelley comes to mind), tells us much about the politics and culture of the time.

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Born in 1887 and raised in Oregon, Van Waters, daughter of an Episcopal minister, began her career at the height of the Progressive-era reform and remained a pioneer in women's penal reform and juvenile justice through the New Deal and World War II, as well as the postwar era of reaction against social reform. In 1913, Van Waters became one of very few female graduates of the Ph.D. Program in Psychology at Clark University under the direction of G. Stanley Hall. Drawing on Hall's training, but more importantly on the model of female reform provided by Jane Addams, Van Waters embarked on her lifelong work; the early highlights included the position as superintendent of a juvenile detention home in Portland, and as superintendent at the Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall. In Los Angeles, she also founded an experimental school for girls who had been sent to juvenile court. By the end of the 1920s, she had established a national reputation in the area of juvenile reform; it was logical that she be appointed superintendent of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women at Framingham in 1932, where she remained until her retirement at age 70. At this state prison of several hundred, Van Waters enhanced her reputation as an advocate for prisoner's rights, including educational opportunities, job training and employment both within the prison and the wider community, and the right of convicted mothers to raise their children whenever possible. Van Waters probably became most famous among the Massachusetts public when she was forced to defend herself in the late 1940s against widespread charges, graphically covered in the local press, that she ran a lax, undisciplined institution that encouraged female sexual immorality, specifically, homosexual behavior; these charges almost cost Van Waters her job.

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