RIVERSIDE REFORMATORY FOR WOMENLENA C. ROSS, Superintendent, 1921-1936
Lena Ross, born in Rutland in 1866, devoted her entire life to education
and social reform. She taught the primary grades in the Rutland schools for
twenty-four years before becoming a deputy probation officer and field worker
for the State Board of Charities and Probation in 1918. In 1921, Lena Ross
became the first superintendent of the women's reformatory. Over the next
fifteen years, she instituted progressive programs for the rehabilitation
of women offenders, most of whom, she believed, had never experienced love,
respect, or a decent home life. She had the bars removed from the windows
of the former "House of Correction" and converted the facility into a sort
of group home for wayward women, a tradition that her successors continued
over the next four decades. In 1931, Vermont authors Dorothy Canfield and
Sara Cleghorn celebrated Lena Ross's rehabilitation program in
"Miss Ross' Girls."
The majority of women at the Rutland Reformatory during the inter-war
years were serving time for "crimes against morality." Of those, nearly
all had been imprisoned for adultery or cohabitation (17 of the 53 inmates
in 1929 had been serving time for adultery or breach of parole from previous
adultery charges).
Lena Ross was a member of the Eugenics Survey Advisory Committee and the
Sub-committee on Care of the Handicapped for the Vermont Commission on Country
Life. The Eugenics Survey's 1929
study of the women at the Rutland Reformatory
was evidently suggested by Lena Ross.