Book Review

This time it's personal. After missing an opportunity as a graduate student in the early 1970s to meet the aged Miriam Van Waters, whose distinguished career as a penal reformer spanned from the First World War to the launching of Sputnik, historian Estelle Freedman now attempts to capture her through biography. Freedman's effort is a valiant one because Van Waters, a student of psychology, struggled with her own identity and sexuality, and repeatedly pushed away anyone who tried to get too close. One can only imagine how the intensely private Van Waters would have reacted to learning that her most personal conflicts would become the subject of history. She would have at least been relieved that her biographer approached her life with great care and wrote a splendid book that deserves a wide audience.	1
An examination of Van Waters's public career alone would have provided more than enough material for a compelling biography. By the time that Van Waters was thirty-two, she had earned a Ph.D. from Clark University, served as the superintendent of the Los Angeles Juvenile Hall, refereed the city's juvenile court, and founded the famous El Retiro School, "Where Girls Go Right." Van Waters was also an accomplished writer and, more importantly, was widely read in influential circles during the 1920s by such notables as Felix Frankfurter and his Harvard Law School crowd. Van Waters's Youth in Conflict (1925) and Parents on Probation (1928) also earned her an invitation to direct the juvenile crime survey for the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, more commonly known as the Wickersham Commission (1929). In her report The Child Offender in the Federal System of Justice, Van Waters announced that it was time for the federal government to "recognize the concept of juvenile delinquency." As a result of her efforts, three years later, the first federal statute on juvenile delinquency became law	2
Van Waters's career, however, did not fade away like progressivism. In 1932, she became the superintendent of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women in Framingham and held that position with only one brief interruption until she retired in 1957 at the age of seventy. That interruption, it must be added, was not her choice. In January of 1949, Van Waters was dismissed because of alleged mismanagement of the institution. She fought this firing, which led to theatrical public hearings, most notable for their sensational charges about Van Waters allowing a "doll racket" to operate at Framingham. This charge of sexual deviance among the women prisoners, as Freedman points out, was a common weapon in the Cold War crusades to purify American society. Unfortunately, this fascinating chapter about the most dramatic moments in Van Waters's public life is also the most frustrating part of Maternal Justice because Freedman does not allow her narrative to do enough work for her. Instead, she is too eager to explain how Van Waters "could counteract so forcefully the powerful conservative currents that had influenced her dismissal" (292). Accordingly, the outcomes of these public hearings never seem to be in doubt.	3
Maternal Justice will, however, help to restore Miriam Van Waters to her proper place in American history. As Freedman suggests it is odd that Van Waters, who achieved such national prominence during her life, should be so largely forgotten. "Perhaps her choice of penology, a small and marginal arena even within reform circles," Freedman speculates, "kept Van Waters from gaining the kind of reputation afforded leaders of the settlement house, suffrage, and birth control movements" (351-52). It is not surprising that Van Waters has been rediscovered. The efforts by scholars like Lori Ginzberg, Linda Gordon, Kathleen McCarthy, Robyn Muncy, and Kathryn Kish Sklar among others to reconstruct a female reform tradition from nineteenth-century benevolence to the construction of the twentieth-century welfare state have paved the way for Van Waters's return. Moreover, Freedman convincingly places Van Waters squarely into this reform tradition and makes an important contribution to this growing literature by revealing through Van Waters's life that this tradition has continued into modern times.	4
Maternal Justice also raises pressing questions about the role of experts or specialists in American society. Van Waters's troubled personal life, especially her own difficulties as a mother, raises disturbing questions about who is fit to judge, especially when their judgment carries the force of law. In this sense, the personal is profoundly political.	5
David S. Tanenhaus University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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