Katharine Bement Davis

In 1879, Davis graduated from Rochester Free Academy, a public high school. Since her family was unable to afford the tuition for college, she taught at Dunkirk Academy. There she established a women's equality club and led a women's literacy group.[1]

After teaching high school chemistry for ten years, Davis saved enough money to continue her schooling full-time. In 1890, she enrolled in Vassar College, a center of progressive education for women.[1] Davis combined her interests in science and social reform by studying food chemistry and nutritional studies. Taking this course of study gave Davis the opportunity for a career in a public health agency after graduation.[1]

After graduating from Vassar, Davis continued her studies at Columbia University's Barnard College, a separate women's college within the university, while teaching at Brooklyn Heights Seminary for Girls. She continued studying the chemistry of food.

While studying at Barnard, Davis managed a project to develop a model home for New York State's display at the Chicago World Fair. As a result of the success of the home display, she was offered a job running a settlement house in Philadelphia.[1]

The settlement house movement began in the late 19th century to socialize the poor and uneducated residents that occupied immigrant neighborhoods in a city to American values and customs. In the United States, "college settlements" were run by young women graduates of progressive colleges who as "workers" moved into a neighborhood house in order to Americanize the local residents.[9]

The College Settlement on Philadelphia's St. Mary's Street served a district of indigent blacks and Russian immigrants. Davis moved into the house as "head worker". While in Philadelphia, Davis worked with W. E. B. Du Bois, who was then at the University of Pennsylvania conducting groundbreaking research on blacks in urban America. Davis noted in the Settlement's annual report that "the investigation into the condition of the colored people of . . . the seventh ward which contains about 10,000 Negroes, nearly one fourth the entire number in the city" would be carried out "by means of house-to-house canvass."[1]

Davis first began her journey to Chicago in 1893 when she directed a diet and living standard exhibit in the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.[10] In 1897, Davis quit her job at the Philadelphia College Settlement House and moved to Chicago, Illinois.[10] Here she attended the University of Chicago, where she was the first female Fellow in Political Science-Economics to earn a Ph.D.[11] Davis studied political economy under Thorstein Veblen and minored in sociology under George E. Vincent.[10] She also received a traveling fellowship, in which she went to Berlin and Vienna. Davis earned her Ph.D. in economics in 1901 and decided to take the New York civil service exam.[12] Shen then took a job at Bedford Hills Reformatory.[10]

The New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, New York, opened in May 1901 with Davis as the superintendent.[3] Educating and giving more opportunities to women was her primary goal as she believed that a lack of opportunity drove women to criminal and immoral activities.[11] Davis was in favor of arresting suspected prostitutes and had little regard for whether an innocent women would be wrongfully accused.[13] Besides the administration building, the campus included "a reception hall, four cottages, a laundry building, a powerhouse, a gate house, and a stable". The reception hall had two wings, one wing modeled after a traditional prison with three tiers of 24 cells each, and the other wing contained rooms accommodating 42 inmates.[1] The women at Bedford ranged in ages of sixteen to thirty; they had been arrested for various reasons such as prostitution or public intoxication.[13] When Davis began working at Bedford, approximately one quarter of the women were non-native, but by the end of her career African-American women made up one fifth of the population.[13] In the beginning Davis fashioned the reformatory to be more likely a boarding school than a prison, as she wanted to help women start a new life.[13] However, when she saw more offenders, she began to associate immorality with criminality and mental capacity; this lead her to a eugenicist line of thinking.[13]

In 1909, Davis arranged for the New York Public Education Association to do a psychological study at Bedford. Davis believed that the results of her tests indicated more "mental deficiencies" in delinquent women.[13] The physiological tests did not take into account the education levels of the inmates.[13] In 1910, Davis advocated for judges to have access to pre-sentencing background research and evaluations so that they could make appropriate placements. Because Davis associated mental deficiency with criminality, she posited that criminals should serve life rather than set sentences for each crime.[13] She gave the inmates indeterminate sentences so they would have hope for the future and change but she would keep them separate from society.[13] In 1913, Davis wrote up her ideas in a pamphlet, A Rational Plan for the Treatment of Women Convicted in the Courts of New York City, that was widely distributed to people affiliated with criminal justice system in New York City.[14] Davis left Bedford in 1914 when Mayor John Purroy Mitchel selected Davis to head the Correction Commission making her the first woman to lead an agency in New York City.[1][3] Based on her role in the suffragist community and position as commissioner, Davis was on the Progressive party's 1914 slate for State Constitutional Convention seat, making her the first woman to run for a New York statewide office on a major party ticket.[15]

During the 1910s, Davis was a proponent of strict moral standards regarding sex. She criticized men and women for engaging in nonmarital sex and even supported the federal government's crusade against prostitution and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.[4] Therefore, women's sexual misconducts would be the main focus of Davis's early research. However, by the 1920s, Davis's focus shifted to examine actual sexual behaviors.[4] At the Bureau of Social Hygiene, Davis arranged for ground-breaking research on the sexuality of "normal" females. Around 5000 women, whose names were found from club memberships directories and college alumnae lists, were asked to participate in the research.[4] They were surveyed about "auto-erotic practices, the frequency of sexual desire, homosexual experiences, use of contraceptives, frequency of sexual intercourse, and pre-marital and extra-marital sexual experiences."[1][17] The results of this research would help her compile and publish Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women in 1929.[4][11] Scandalous for the time, it contested the Victorian notion of female "passionlessness" and shocked readers due to its liberal discussion of masturbation. More than two decades later, Davis's work would influence Dr. Alfred Kinsey's research. In 1921, Davis co-founded the National Research Council’s Committee for Research on the Problems of Sex to further study human sexuality.[4] Overall, today Katherine Bement Davis is known to be one of the most influential people when it comes to research regarding human sexuality and sex.[10]

Compulsory sterilization was seen by many as a way to reduce the incidence of mental illness and mental retardation in the general population of the United States. Davis was a eugenicist and during her tenure as General Secretary, she affiliated the Bureau with leaders in the field of eugenics such as Harry Laughlin, Charles Davenport and E. S. Gosney, director of The Human Betterment Foundation in California. Due to Davis's focus on morals, she would increasingly go towards eugenic explanations for criminality and immorality.[18] Davis was not always leaning towards eugenics however, she first gave equal weighting to heredity and environment, describing the two as "hopelessly entangled."[18] In 1909, Davis would show her support of eugenics as she warned of "bad heredity" was the cause of problems made by "moral imbeciles."[18] Davis would soon equate "moral inbeciles" with mental incapacity. She would soon believe that treatment should fit the criminal and not the crime. Since, to her, intelligence was fixed and inheritable, she started to believe that some offenders should be confined for life in custodial institutions.[18] In 1924, Davis accepted a position on the Committee on Eugenics of the United States' Advisory Council.[19]

Back in 1928, Katherine Bement Davis was not able to continue her activities due to her worsened health, in regards to her gallbladder specifically.[10] Consequently, by the year of 1928, she retired from the Bureau of Social Hygiene.[10] After her retirement, she was honored for her contributions. Consequently, on February 2, 1928, the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom was filled with Progressive Era reformers to honor Davis at a testimonial dinner. The guests including Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Walter Lippman, Judge William McAdoo, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Lillian Wald and Felix Warburg.[1]