For Women’s History Month, join Karin L. Zipf, a Professor of History at East Carolina University, who will be discussing her book, Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory (2016). The book is a detailed study of the State Home and Industrial School in Eagle Springs, referred to as Samarcand Manor, and the school’s infamous 1931 arson case. During the rise of the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, North Carolina forcibly sterilized more than 2,000 women and girls in between 1929 and 1950. This extreme measure reflects how pseudoscience justified widespread gender, race, and class discrimination in the Jim Crow South. The people and events surrounding both the institution and the court case sparked a public debate about the expectations of white womanhood, the nature of contemporary science and medicine, and the role of the juvenile justice system that resonated throughout the succeeding decades. Registration appreciated.

Free and open to the public.