“When Is a School Not a School?” Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith, Child Prisons, and the Limits of Reform in Progressive Era Texas

Abstract

This archival study explores the life and work of Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith (1885–1942), a Progressive Era social worker and prison warden. Specifically, I explore the first phase of her career as a House Physician at the Virginia K. Johnson Home in Dallas, Texas (1911–1915) and as the first Superintendent of the Texas State Training School for Girls in Gainesville, Texas (1916–1925). Using archival research, I detail three conflicts that defined Dr. Smith’s superintendency: her fight to reclassify a youth prison as a school, her challenges to a Ku Klux Klan-dominated legislature, and her refusal to cede authority to a State Board of Control. Together, these conflicts led the Board to terminate Dr. Smith’s position, an outcome that would replay twice more before she retired from prisonwork. I argue that when most reformers made significant concessions, compromising their visions to maintain state funding and political allyship, Dr. Smith stood out for her record of refusal. And yet, like other reformers, she left Texas with the capacity to imprison more women and girls than ever before.

Keywords

• social work history
• Progressive Era
• training schools
• anticarceral social work
• abolitionist social work
• carceral state