(upbeat music) - On today's show, we're going to have another lesson in Kansas history, and wait 'til you hear this one.

We're going to learn about an obscure public health law called Chapter 205.

It's gonna rile you up.

Coming up next on Inspire.

(upbeat music) (soft music) Inspire is sponsored by Kansas Furniture Mart, using furniture to inspire conversation, and by the Blanche Bryden Foundation.

(upbeat music) Hello, thank you for joining us for Inspire.

I'm pleased to be here with the beautiful Amber Dickinson and Leslie Fleuranges, and two more beauties coming up.

- Today, we're gonna discuss Chapter 205, a World War I era health law that many Kansans have never heard of.

- Joining us today via Zoom are Nikki Perry, author of Policing Sex in the Sunflower State, which tells the story of the controversial law, and we welcome back one of our favorite history professors, Kerry Winn of Washburn University.

Thank you so much for joining us on Inspire.

- Thank you.

- So, we gotta just jump right in, because we've got a lot to talk about today.

So, Nikki, please tell us about your book, Policing Sex in the Sunflower State.

- Yeah, so this law, Chapter 205, in itself, was kind of boring.

It was just the law that gave the Board of Health the power to detain people for disease, to quarantine people.

Where it got interesting was how it was implemented.

Women, but not men, were detained for having syphilis and gonorrhea.

So, between World War I and World War II, over 5,000 and women were sent to a prison in Lansing, Kansas.

They didn't commit any crime, they just had syphilis or gonorrhea.

And, while a few men were detained right after the law was passed, there were a couple hundred, after World War I was over, they really stopped detaining men.

So, it was this very gendered policy where the state was imprisoning women just for having a disease.

- And this is crazy because, oftentimes, they didn't really have the disease.

They hadn't really gone through an examination.

They just wanted to get rid of them, in some cases.

And there's all ages.

I mean, going down to a fourteen year old.

- Yeah, actually, even younger than that.

So, this institution where they were sent was called the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women in Lansing, and women who had babies could actually take their babies with them.

So, there were toddlers and babies there, there were also young girls who were sent there, so girls as young as like nine or ten who had a disease and were sent there.

So, it was a whole range of people.

The policy was really focused on, there was a lot of kind of national angst about young women's sexuality and trying to control young women's sexual behaviors, and this was kind of one response to that.

So, most of the women were detained were in their teens and twenties, was kind of the largest segment of the population there.

- So, who put this law into place in the first place?

So, I mean, if you think about that time, right, there was prohibition, there was people trying to stop marijuana, we had all these control freaks back then, right?

So, who was it that was saying, "Let's put this law into place," in the first place?

- Yeah, so it kind of came about during World War I, and it was very much related to the military.

This is before we had antibiotics, so syphilis and gonorrhea weren't really things that we could cure, and they were is some of the leading reasons why men had to miss active military duty.

And so, as the United States was gearing up to get into war nationally, officials considered whether they wanted to do something like give out condoms to soldiers, but instead they decided on this elaborate plan to try to convince soldiers not to have sex.

And then, when that didn't work, they were like, "Let's just round up all the women around the camps."

And so, this actually happened nationally, that women were, especially around military bases, were detained during World War I, but Kansas was kind of unique in that we just kept going for it, and we kept detaining women between the World Wars.

So, we were a little more enthusiastic, I guess, in Kansas than some other places.

- How were these women identified?

And, furthermore, how were they then rounded up and brought to this facility?

- Yeah, so there were various ways that people came to be, how authorities found out.

So, sometimes people would turn them in; a family member or just somebody who knew that they had a disease.

In some cases, it was actually a woman's husband.

Because men weren't detained under this, sometimes men would cheat on their wife, bring home a disease, and then they'd get in a fight and he would turn her in, and she'd have be sent to prison because of this.

So, some of 'em were turned in.

Other women were just detained, and they might be arrested for prohibition, or just being in the wrong place, or whatever.

So.

authorities would just routinely test all women that they came in contact with for these diseases.

So, even if they weren't convicted for the other offense, they might be sent to this prison because of their disease.

And 20 percent of the women actually volunteered to go there because they couldn't afford treatment anywhere else.

And that's kind of another part of this really sad story, was that there weren't a lot of public health clinics, and so some women just, that was the only way they could get care.

- Wow, and, okay, now I read that a lot of this was they would go and kind of stake a dance hall and just round the women up there.

- Yeah, so there were raids that authorities would do, so it could be around dance halls or a lot of liquor raids were another thing, 'cause, as you mentioned, this is during prohibition, and so, it's kinda like you have these routine, if the police were kind of concentrating on a certain area that they were trying to clean up or whatever, it would have really different consequences for women versus men, because if the men, if they didn't get caught doing anything illegal, they would be let go, as they should have been.

But the women, they would take them all and go test them for disease, so you might end up, just by being in the wrong place, being sent to this farm.

- So, how did you even come across this Chapter 205, and what precipitated you deciding to write a book?

- Yeah, so I was in graduate school, and I was looking for topics to do research on, and I was trying to learn a little bit about prostitution in the twenties and thirties in this area, and I just came across a website on the State Historical Society's website where they mentioned this.

And I was like, "I had never heard of this before."

This is really interesting.

I'm from Kansas, and I was like, "I'm really into women's history, how did I not know this?"

So, then I kind of just kept digging and digging, and it just got more and more interesting, I think, as I looked into it more, because, at first, I thought that all the women were gonna be prostitutes, 'cause that was kind of how it was originally talked about, and a lot of the official government documents talk about these women as being in dire need of moral reform and all these things.

But, when you actually, there's a set of really interesting inmate interviews, and when you hear the women's perspective, many of them didn't really break any of the moral rules.

Some of them did, some of them were having a great time, but other ones were really not.

A lot of the women were married, and they would've been able to contract syphilis or gonorrhea in a perfectly respectable way, I guess, and they still ended up in this prison.

- So, in the intake interviews, there's this phrasing where they tell these women that, "You've broken the law of chastity," so who created the idea of the law of chastity?

I bet I have some ideas, but do you offer some perspective on who created this idea that, somehow, because women were exercising their sexuality, that they were in violation of this established moral code?

- Yeah, yeah.

The questions on the interview form are so- - Insane?

- Like it says, "At what age did you first break the law of chastity?"

And, "What was the cause of your moral downfall?"

And kind of the interesting piece about this is they actually used the same form for the women who were detained under Chapter 205 and for the women who were there for any other offense.

So, if you were there theft or murder, you would've answered those same questions, and that kind of shows that really close connection that a lot of people had between women's criminality and sexuality, like they were very much tied together in ways that they weren't for men.

(upbeat music) - All right, Nikki, and, Kerry, we're gonna get you in here as well, and are you a little riled up?

Well, we to learn more about this in the Sunflower State, and what's going on with venereal disease and more on Chapter 205.

Please stay with us.

(upbeat music) - Today, we're gonna be talking about indoor plants that are wonderful selections for your office.

I don't think many people have house plants in their office, and you absolutely should.

They have some of the same benefits as in your home; reducing air pollutants, and dust mites, and all those things that we don't want out of the air.

But they have some additional benefits in the office.

Offices that have house plants can actually decrease employee sick time by about 14 percent, and increase productivity by about 30 percent.

If you have plants in your individual office while you're working on your computer, it can actually increase the amount of time that you wanna sit there, focused on those computer tasks.

Just by having them around us, it makes us a little bit happier and more content being at work, so who doesn't want that?

These plants are all wonderful selections for our office.

Many of our offices have fluorescent lights, and some have small windows or no windows at all, so all of these can tolerate low light conditions.

The first plant I wanna talk about is Rattlesnake Calathea.

This is a little bit of a different Calathea.

It's got a different leaf shape, and it has this wonderful dark purple underside, with a light green leaf that has this really nice, glossy, dark green pattern on it.

So, it's a very striking plant to have in your office.

Another thing that I love about the Calathea is they do fold up and unfold during the day.

And, sometimes the rustle of the leaves, that little bit of movement, is my indication that I've been sitting at my desk too long and I need to get up.

So, just having plants around us can be that nice reminder that we too are living and need to be moving.

Spider Plant or Airplane Plant, as some know it, is another great choice for the office.

It really propagates very readily.

It will shoot off babies as soon as it gets to be just a little bit bigger than what this plant is, so it's a great plant that you can actually share around the office, share with your coworkers.

You can take those babies, the small plants, and just set them on top of soil.

It needs a little bit of water, not a lot, and you can mostly neglect it.

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ZZ Palm can absolutely tolerate just fluorescent lighting, but it is just gonna sit there.

It doesn't grow very fast, it can sometimes be months before you see it grow or change at all, and it has this kind of glossy, waxy leaf that sometimes makes people think that it's a fake plant, but it isn't a fake plant, it's very much alive and gives you the same benefits as all the others, it just is a little bit of a slow grower.

Snake Plant is another lovely one.

The variegated versions of Snake Plant are much more common.

I like this because it's a little more compact, and has that nice, dark green leaf to it.

Again, it's gonna be very low water, a couple months in between watering is the best practice.

But, if you start to see that leaf pucker up a little bit, that's a good indication that it does need to be watered.

And then, finally, many of us have Pothos in our office.

It's probably the one that I see the most, but it's just the typical Golden Pothos, and there are so many better varieties and colors that you can add to your office that give that little bit of interest.

So, this is actually a Marble Queen.

It's a green with a white on top.

There's also a Snow Queen that's more of a white base with green.

And then there's also a Neon Pothos, which is a really bright lime green, which can be a lot of fun for your office.

No matter what plant you select, make sure that you're selecting a plant that's appropriate for the office you have, and pay attention to the cultural requirements, the water and moisture that it needs, and your plants will be happy, and, in return, you'll be a more productive, happier worker as well.

(upbeat music) - We're back with our guests, author, Nikki Perry, and Professor Kerry Winn.

So, Professor Winn, should we be shocked by how differently men and women were treated under this law?

- That's a really hard question to answer.

I would say yes, I would hope we were shocked, but, really, if you know a lot about US history in this time period, to treat men and women differently under this law is really conversant with the rest of the body of laws in the United States, in many ways.

Even in areas that aren't directly about the policing of sexuality, men and women were often treated very, very differently under laws.

For example, one of the ways you can see this most is for men and women, when they were married, their legal rights changed a great deal or differed a great deal from each other.

So, in the time period between 1907 and 1922, for example, a woman could lose her citizenship in the United States if she married a man who was not a citizen of the US.

That didn't happen for a man.

So, there were a lot of double standards in the law at the time.

- I have to ask, was there any kind of situation where there were more of one race than another going into these camps, and being affected by this Chapter 205?

- Women of color were overrepresented among the women who were detained, and some of that has to go with how the law was implemented.

So, if you think about police officers raiding a dance hall or whatever, they were more likely to raid certain parts of town than others.

Part of the way that the law was written was there was a lot of discretion given to a local health officer to decide whether a woman was respectable enough to be trusted to get treatment on their own.

So, it wasn't that anybody who had a disease was sent there, it was women who were sent there who they didn't think could be trusted to not have sex with anyone, essentially.

So, racism played played into that.

And then, also, poor women were a lot more likely to go, because, when you think about the fact that a lot of women volunteered to go there, there was one thing I read that said that a treatment for a year of syphilis was out of the price range of 80 percent of the US population at the time.

So, it was very expensive to get care, and so that could lead to some women, that really being their only option.

- But there were nine year olds who were sent to these camps.

I mean, how could they do such a thing to a child?

- I think, sort of, the bigger issue, when I was reading through these transcripts, is they continually refer to these children as women, and I think that it's this hypersexualization of children is extraordinarily problematic, and so I think, and please tell me if I'm missing the mark here, but it seems to me that they were evaluating the sexuality, the potential sexuality of a child, as opposed to the reality and that this is a child.

Is that sort of what the mentality was?

- Yeah, yeah, so, and I think part of this too is this is during the time of eugenics in the United States, and we see a growth in these types of institutions that are supposed to be reforming young women and kids, and there was kind of this idea, this strong faith in social science, that if we just applied social science to people, we could fix all these problems and prevent all these degenerate groups from doing whatever they were gonna do.

that the people in charge didn't think was proper.

And so I think there was definitely this emphasis on intervening in the lives of young women before they went all the way down the road to prostitution.

And so, you're definitely right that they'll talk about how these women need moral reform and stuff, and then they don't mention the fact that the nine year old was sexually abused by their uncle and that's why they were there, and- - Right.

- Yes.

- It's very disturbing accounts with these kids.

- It seems crazy to me.

Was there backlash to this at the time from anyone?

- I wish I knew more about this, and one piece of it is I'm not sure how aware people were of what was happening.

There was backlash.

The element of children being at the farm, I think, was the piece that I found the most backlash against.

So, there was a report written in 1933 where a government board evaluated a lot of state institutions, and they were definitely saying they didn't think kids should be going to this prison.

- And this was still going on up until the forties, correct?

- Things changed a lot in World War II.

As the United States entered into war, they kind of started going down the same path when they were, sorry, the rate of women being detained under Chapter 205, started to go up, but then penicillin is just a total game changer.

And, all of a sudden, these diseases are things that are pretty easy to treat, and so the number of women being detained goes down really fast.

But there are a couple women as late as the 1950s who are being detained under this law.

- And Kerry, we talked about the disparities, about how the law affects men and women.

Why is it important for the young men and women of today to realize the history, all this that has taken place?

- That's a really good question.

I think that, A, it is a part, we don't necessarily always talk about laws like chapter 205, and that it's important to know that those kind of discriminatory laws existed, not even necessarily on their face, but in practice, right?

It's important to know the way in which laws were implemented, and the history of that, because I don't necessarily think we are free from laws that do that today, right?

So, you have to be able to recognize it.

And I think that there are also generations of individuals who fought against these laws, and fought pretty courageously against them, and so that's a tradition that is worth keeping in mind.

- So, we have this sort of longstanding tradition, in this country, of taking issue issues like mental health issues or drug issues, and punishing them with prison time.

Does this law fall into that same kind of punitive way that we address what we've decided are moral concerns in our society?

Would you classify this sort of in that same name?

- I would think so.

Even at the time, there are people who recognize that this is not necessarily the way you cure venereal disease.

Venereal disease was a public health question and problem, and many women wanted treatment for venereal disease.

But to think that you might have to be incarcerated to get that treatment is not a terrific public health strategy, right?

And, even at the time, in 1919, Frances Storrs Johnson, who was an Ob-Gyn who was from Kansas, spoke at an international conference, and she said, "Compulsory detention for treatment of "venereal disease is not the way to cure venereal disease.

"You have to treat men as well as women."

There are two people involved in this scenario, at least.

And, if you wanna stop transmission, there are much better ways to do it than forcing women into prison, which happened in many cases throughout the world.

- And so, what was going on in these prisons, by the way?

I mean, were they doing laundry?

Were they doing something "to give back to society?"

What was their role while being incarcerated?

And was there a certain length of time that women had to stay in these prisons?

- Nikki can speak pretty specifically about the Kansas Industrial Farm, but very often, in many facilities throughout the world, they're providing for their own care, they're actually running the farm, so they're doing all the labor that's involved in that while they're staying and while they're getting treatment, and, Nikki, you wanna say more?

- Yeah, so there was this movement to change the way that women prisons worked during this period, and the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women was actually a model that other people from across the country came to visit because the women weren't behind bars, they were, especially in the earlier period, they were walking around.

It was out in the country, they took care of chickens, they grew all their own food.

So, in some ways, it wasn't like what we think about with prison, but they weren't free to leave either.

And there are definitely, as time went on, as you get further into the 1920s and thirties, there were more bars added, and it started to feel a little more institutional, I would say.

But the idea was that these women were supposed to be there to be morally cured, and there was language in the Board of Health documents that said it's not always recognized as something more than just a drug is needed to treat venereal disease, implying that these nine year old girls and these women who got disease from their husbands were at moral fault.

And so a lot of this idea that we needed to teach women how to work hard, how to take care of a home, and how to be proper feminine in order to really rehabilitate them.

And so they were actually there under an indefinite sentence until they were supposed to be morally cured.

- [Leslie] So, there's no due process involved in this whatsoever, right?

- [Nikki] No, they did not receive a trial, yeah.

- And so, really, the message this sends is that, because, correct me if I'm wrong, in some of these prisons, you've got women that are there for moral concerns right next to people that have committed a true crime, and so the message that this seems to send is that, if you don't adhere to this moral standard that someone has just created, that you are equivalent in our society to a genuine criminal.

Is that the such that this is sending us?

That's horrific.

- I think so, and that just the very idea that particular bodies can be policed, right, or are for policing, and that's one of the things I think also sticks with us as well, right?

I mean, the policing, and the legacy of policing women's bodies in a way we don't necessarily police men's bodies.

Both through healthcare or through legislation, that's something that lives on.

(upbeat music) - Ladies, thank you so much for being with us today.

When we come back, we're gonna continue our discussion on Chapter 205.

(upbeat music) - Okay, ladies, just when you think you've heard it all, we learned something about Kansas history, but then this was in other states as well.

I wanna start with you, because I know you're riled.

- I just, I think it's so dangerous, first of all, to create these constructs out of nowhere that we expect women to adhere to, and then, when women don't do what we think women should do, we punish them, and it's unbelievable to me.

And I look at something like this, which, in all reality, what this type of law does is it gives men permission to get rid of women that they don't wanna deal with anymore, and I think that that's morally reprehensible, and we're doing it still today.

I'm so tired of listening to people try to control women in this kind of way.

Obviously, we don't have women that we're just rounding up and throwing in prison, but, gosh, we are doing things that are pretty close to it.

- Yeah, I mean, I'm thrilled to know that women are standing up for themselves more and more, major corporations are recognizing that they have to treat women equally, we just heard that the soccer teams in the United States- - Yeah.

- They just got a settlement, although that's not a hundred percent done either, but it's an man's world and we're just living in it.

We hope that, in the next 20, 30 years, that's going away.

There has to be some equality, because women bring more to the table than ever before, and we're only getting better and better and better.

- But you look at legislation like they're passing in Texas, where they're basically assigning bounty hunters to go find women who are seeking abortions and turn them in.

- Well, no- It has echoes of this to me that.

- That is unacceptable, and just horrible that they would even think to do something like that.

The fear that other people have of the strength and the power of women is just totally upsetting, and why would we want to do this to people that are our own citizens?

I don't understand it.

- Because it's oppression.

- Let's go back a little bit.

Have you guys been hearing about some of the younger women who want to be treated differently, who want, so now that's kind of, and when you think of all the women who have worked so hard, marched, talked, voted to make things better, and then to hear that maybe some of them kind of liked it how it used to be, how does that make you feel?

- I don't ever wanna judge someone's opinion- - Right.

- But I think, overall, that having that mindset for yourself personally, and then encouraging legislation that is punitive towards women are two different things.

You can think what you want all you want, and that's your own personal business, but the second that you put a law on the books that punishes women unfairly, or you accept practices in the workplace that treats women differently, or however you are going about discriminating against women, that's the difference, right?

The difference between having a personal mindset and causing real damage to fellow women.

(upbeat music) - Well, that's all the time we have for today.

If you'd like to watch this program again, or any KTWU production, go to watch.KTWU.org.

- And, if you are so inspired to learn more about our guests, find out what's coming up on future shows, and get access to additional content, be sure to visit our website at www.KTWU.org/Inspire.

- Inspiring women, inspiring historical knowledge, like it or not, inspiring you on KTWU.

Thank you for watching.

(upbeat music) Inspire is sponsored by Kansas Furniture Mart, using furniture to inspire conversation, and by the Blanche Bryden Foundation.