Miriam Van Waters

Early life and education

Miriam Van Waters was born in 1887 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Her parents, George Browne (1865–1934) and Maude Vosburg (1866–1948) Van Waters, were from middle-class families from Rensselaer Falls, New York, in George's case and Dubois, Pennsylvania, in Maud's. After studying at Oberlin College, George attended Bexley Hall, an Episcopal seminary from which he received a divinity degree in 1883. In 1884 in Dubois, the site of his first posting as a clergyman, George met and married Maud. Their first child, Rachel, was born in 1885, the year the family moved to Greensburg. Rachel died there at age 2 and, in the same year, Miriam was born. In 1891, the family moved again, this time to George's new posting as rector of St. David's Episcopal Church in Portland, Oregon.

Miriam, as the eldest daughter, helped her mother with housekeeping and with the care of younger siblings, of which there were three more—Ruth, Rebekah, and George—by 1896 and another, Ralph, in 1905. Her mother, in failing health, often retreated to the Oregon coast or to her parents' home in Pennsylvania, leaving Miriam in charge of the household. During these growing-up years, Miriam was strongly influenced by her father's love of books and scholarship, his participation in the Social Gospel movement, and his use of the rectory as a kind of settlement house open to everyone. She attended St. Helen's Hall, an Episcopal girls' school, for her secondary education, graduating in 1904. Remaining at St. Helen's for another year as a post-graduate student, she left Portland for the University of Oregon in Eugene in 1905.

The university, about 150 miles (240 km) south of Portland, had a total enrollment of only about 500. Van Waters excelled academically, majoring in philosophy and focusing on courses related to progressive ideas, feminism, public service, and politics. Her senior thesis was titled "The Relation of Philosophical Materialism to Social Radicalism". She served on student committees, joined the women's debate team, and became chief editor of the Oregon Monthly, a campus literary magazine. As a graduate student, she majored in psychology and was the teaching assistant for one of her professors, Henry D. Sheldon. Her master's thesis focused on philosophical materialism and social progress. In 1910, she was awarded a fellowship at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, to pursue a doctorate in psychology under the guidance of G. Stanley Hall, a specialist in child psychology and education.

Van Waters admired Hall's intellect and use of quantitative data but resisted his focus on genetics as the component of adolescent psychology most worthy of study. She preferred the interventionist approach of social reformers, especially Jane Addams, in the lives of troubled teen-agers. In her third year at Clark, she changed advisors, from Hall to Alexander Chamberlain, an anthropologist who favored cultural rather than genetic explanations for adolescent behavior. Her dissertation, The Adolescent Girl among Primitive People, was influenced by Chamberlain's cross-cultural studies and her personal investigations of juvenile delinquency in Boston and in her home town, Portland. She graduated from Clark in 1913 with a Ph.D. in anthropology.

Early career: 1913–1932

Later in 1913, Van Waters accepted an offer from the Boston Children's Aid Society (BCAS) to serve as a probation officer for girls awaiting trial or sentencing in juvenile court. To be nearer her family, she applied for work in Portland, and in 1914 returned there to become superintendent of the Frazer Detention Home, the condition of which concerned the Multnomah County Juvenile Court. The detention center held boys and girls who had untreated diseases and a poor diet, were given little to do, and were subjected to corporal punishment with straps and rubber hoses. During her short tenure, Van Waters recruited volunteer medical doctors and a volunteer psychologist, hired a resident nurse, improved the children's diet, added a library, put the children to work cleaning, painting, and gardening, and banned corporal punishment. Her stay at Frazer ended abruptly in late 1914, when fatigue followed by a diagnosis of tuberculosis made it impossible for her to continue.

She recuperated over the next three years, first at a property owned by her family near Cannon Beach, Oregon, then as an inpatient and later an outpatient at Pottenger Sanatorium near Pasadena, California. Her attempts during these years to start a second career as a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry did not succeed. Despite health concerns, she took and passed a civil service exam, then applied for the position of superintendent at the Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall, a detention center for girls. She began work there in August 1917.

Assisted by many other women reformers, she worked to modify the detention center to include health care, counseling, psychological assessment, improved diet, recreation, and other social services. In 1919, she founded El Retiro, an experimental school for girls aged 14 to 19 chosen from among those sent to Juvenile Hall. The school, kept unlocked in a rural setting outside Los Angeles, favored education, work, and recreation as opposed to incarceration and punishment as antidotes to juvenile delinquency. According to journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns, El Retiro stood in sharp contrast to many early 20th-century prisons for women and children, where conditions were "foul, fetid and medieval". After meeting social reformer Mary Bartelme at Jane Addam's Hull House in 1921, Van Waters promoted the idea of a Los Angeles halfway house for women who had graduated from El Retiro and needed a safe place to stay while looking for work. Partly funded by Chicago philanthropist Ethel Sturges Dummer, the halfway house opened later in 1921 and over the rest of the decade served several hundred young women, each staying an average of four months. From 1920 through 1929, Van Waters, succeeding Orfa Jean Shontz, served as a court-appointed referee presiding over hearings about cases involving boys and girls younger than 12.

According to historian Estelle Freedman, Van Waters' career advancement in the Los Angeles juvenile justice system of the 1920s depended partly on her personal charisma and public-speaking skills, partly on a network of academic, legal, and social-service professionals, and partly on reform networks exemplified by women's clubs such as the Friday Morning Club. She gave frequent lectures about child welfare and juvenile justice to clubs, parent-teacher associations, and church-affiliated welfare groups, and wrote a series of articles about the juvenile court for the Evening Herald.

Between 1917 and 1927, Van Waters lived with other women in a residential complex known as the Colony. Among the residents during at least some of these years were her sister Rebekah, her long-time friends Sara Fisher and Elizabeth (Bess) Woods, and Shontz,. Philanthropists such as Dummer, social reformers including Grace Abbott, Edith Abbott, and Sophonisba Breckinridge; psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, and prison reformer George W. Kirchwey spent time at the Colony when they visited Los Angeles. Shontz convinced Dummer to award a grant to Van Waters to undertake a national survey of women's penal institutions across the United States; taking a leave of absence from her work in Los Angeles, Van Waters began the survey in late 1920. Results were published in 1922 as "Where Girls Go Right: Some Dynamic Aspects of State Correctional Schools for Girls and Young Women" in The Survey, a leading social service journal. Financed by Dummer, Van Waters took other leaves of absence during the 1920s to widely promote her ideas about child welfare and prison reform, citing El Retiro as a model.

With further help from Dummer, she was able to complete a book, Youth in Conflict (1925), detailing her juvenile-delinquency theories and supporting them with examples from court cases. The well-received and financially successful book helped establish Van Waters' national reputation. In 1926, Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard Law School professor who found Van Waters' book impressive, asked her to manage the juvenile delinquency fraction of the Harvard Crime Survey, which sought to determine the causes of crime and the best methods of prevention. In 1928, she completed a second book, Parents on Probation, which repeated her assertions that juvenile delinquency stemmed from families that failed to provide children with adequate attention and positive role models. In 1929, she was elected president of the National Conference of Social Work, the first woman from the western part of the United States to win the organization's top post.

While Van Waters' reputation grew nationally during the 1920s, it declined in Los Angeles County among voters and politicians who preferred methods more punitive than those favored by Van Waters. By 1927, the probation committee, a seven-member group appointed by the county supervisors had become so hostile to Van Waters' methods that it fired Alma Holzschuh, the El Retiro supervisor favored by Van Waters, and replaced her with one more to their liking. Soon thereafter, policemen were used to control the students. Distraught by her loss of control over El Retiro and encouraged by her professional opportunities elsewhere, she began to plan a permanent move to the northeastern United States, Her parents had by then relocated from Portland to Wellsboro, Pennsylvania; the Harvard Crime Survey, with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was unfinished, and in November 1929 Van Waters agreed to direct the juvenile-delinquency division of the Wickersham Commission, formally titled the National Committee on Law Observance and Enforcement, established by President Herbert Hoover. In that same year, she chose to become the legal guardian of seven-year-old Betty Jean Martin, a ward of the juvenile court whom she renamed Sarah Ann Van Waters. After taking a leave of absence in late 1929 to join Hoover's commission in January 1930, Van Waters formally resigned from the Los Angeles juvenile court in late 1930.

Massachusetts Reformatory for Women: 1932–1957

In 1932, Van Waters began a long-term appointment as superintendent at the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women at Framingham, succeeding Jessie Donaldson Hodder. She served as superintendent of that institution for the next quarter-century. Most of the inmates were serving time for prostitution, extramarital sex, or alcoholism. Her feminist principles led to an emphasis on rehabilitation during her period as superintendent, and are reflected in her active staff recruitment programmes. She developed a donor base among female philanthropists, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Margaret Mead, Dummer, and Frances Perkins.

While inmates worked on industrial concerns like manufacturing clothing and flags, or working in the kitchens and prison farm unit, Van Waters also developed educational opportunities for the inmates, such as an art and crafts course, literary class, drama class, prison newspaper, hikers club and a parole club, which networked with other Massachusetts social reform and rehabilitation agencies outside the prison. She also pioneered separate accommodation for younger inmates as well as nursing mothers, who were allowed to keep their children with them until the latter were fostered out at two years of age. When the state legislature tried to separate infants from nursing mothers, Van Waters successfully lobbied against the proposed legislation.

Van Waters was also a closeted lesbian during this period, and in fact, it was a 'moral panic' against 'prison lesbianism' that almost led to her dismissal as a superintendent in 1949. At this time, her successful female networks were to prove indispensable in prompting widespread protest from Episcopal, Jewish and Catholic clergy, the Massachusetts State Federation of Women's Clubs, Massachusetts Council of Churches, National Council of Jewish Women and Americans for Democratic Action.

However, Van Waters herself eluded 'outing' although she sacrificed mementos of her past, such as two decades-worth of romantic letters from her lifelong companion, Geraldine Morgan Thompson (1872–1967). Given strong public support, she weathered this storm. It was to be another eight years before she entered well-earned retirement after her life of public service.

Retirement: 1957–1974

After her retirement, Van Waters moved into an apartment with two former inmates and staff members from the Massachusetts Reformatory. According to her biographer, Estelle Freedman, she did not slow down in retirement, and tirelessly still campaigned for greater prison reform, civil rights, and abolition of the death penalty, which she abhorred. She respected Martin Luther King, but muscular dystrophy and a hip fracture meant that she was unable to personally participate in the cause of civil rights as much as she, a lifelong anti-racist, would have liked. This did not prevent her from participation in the Community of the Holy Spirit, a reform-minded Episcopal women's social service ministry, during the sixties.

As time went on, however, her friends began to pass away. Van Waters and Geraldine Thompson remained lovers, and participated in joint social activities like membership of the Audubon Society. Sadly, Thompson predeceased her, and died in 1967. In 1972, Van Waters experienced a minor stroke, but her remaining friends and associates were concerned at what it might mean. In January 1974, Miriam Van Waters died. Although Estelle Freedman relates that her former onsite superintendent’s house is still there, it has not fared well in a harsher and more punitive penal environment.