Gender and American Culture

Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920

Mary E. Odem

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807863671
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Delinquent Daughters explores the gender, class, and racial tensions that fueled campaigns to control female sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Mary Odem looks at these moral reform movements from a national perspective, but she also undertakes a detailed analysis of court records to explore the local enforcement of regulatory legislation in Alameda and Los Angeles Counties in California. From these legal proceedings emerge overlapping and often contradictory views of middle-class female reformers, court and law enforcement officials, working-class teenage girls, and working-class parents. Odem traces two distinct stages of moral reform. The first began in 1885 with the movement to raise the age of consent in statutory rape laws as a means of protecting young women from predatory men. By the turn of the century, however, reformers had come to view sexually active women not as victims but as delinquents, and they called for special police, juvenile courts, and reformatories to control wayward girls. Rejecting a simple hierarchical model of class control, Odem reveals a complex network of struggles and negotiations among reformers, officials, teenage girls and their families. She also addresses the paradoxical consequences of reform by demonstrating that the protective measures advocated by middle-class women often resulted in coercive and discriminatory policies toward working-class girls.

CHAPTER 1
‘WHITE SLAVES’ AND ‘VICIOUS MEN’

The Age-of-Consent Campaign

In 1889 members of the California Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) lobbied legislators for a bill that was of great interest both to women in the state and also to the leaders of a national campaign. They aimed to amend the rape statute by raising the age of consent for women from ten to eighteen years. Under the proposed bill, men who had sexual intercourse with young women below that age would be guilty of statutory rape and subject to criminal penalties. The purpose of the law was to provide moral protection for young women and girls and to undermine the double standard of morality. For the previous two years WCTU members had circulated a petition throughout California to gain support for the measure. The petition warned that “the increasing and alarming frequency of assaults upon women, and the frightful indignities to which even little girls are subject, have become the shame of our boasted civilization.” It called on legislators to address this situation by enacting legislation “for the adequate punishment of crimes against women and girls.”¹

The reformers encountered stiff opposition to their efforts from male legislators who objected to women’s participation in politics and claimed the proposed law would make men vulnerable to blackmail by immoral, designing young women. Undeterred, WCTU members continued to lobby vigorously for the measure and achieved a partial victory when the legislature raised the age of consent to fourteen. Still not satisfied that the law adequately protected young women, however, the WCTU continued to collect petitions and lobby legislators for the next eight years until state lawmakers voted in 1897 to raise the age of consent to sixteen.²

The effort to raise the age of consent in California was but one battle in a larger national campaign that originated in 1885 among a group of purity reformers in the Northeast and Midwest. At the time, the legal age of consent in most states was either ten or twelve years. This national reform campaign sought to protect young women and girls from moral ruin by subjecting their male seducers to criminal penalties. Within ten years the campaign had spread to all regions of the country, achieving impressive legislative changes and drawing enthusiastic support from suffragists, religious leaders, and labor organizations in addition to temperance advocates.

The campaign found its largest following and most forceful leaders among middle-class white women. Their vigorous activity in the cause stemmed from deep gender, class, and racial tensions over the issue of female sexuality. Most reformers advocated a higher age of consent because they believed that the moral downfall of young women was the direct result of male vice and exploitation. In speeches and campaign literature, they constructed a narrative of seduction that portrayed male seducers as outwardly respectable, middle-class men and their victims as innocent, white, working-class daughters. Through this narrative, women reformers challenged male privilege and the sexual double standard. At the same time, they promoted an image of female purity and passivity that demonstrated the vulnerability of young working-class women by denying their capacity for sexual agency and desire. Moral protection, however, did not automatically extend to all working-class female youth. Reflecting the racism of the dominant society, purity activists largely ignored the sexual dangers facing African American women and girls.

The age-of-consent campaign was part of a broad movement for social purity reform that developed in the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The movement began in the 1870s as a response to attempts by physicians and public health authorities to institute a system of state-regulated prostitution in American cities. Social reformers, Protestant clergy, women’s rights advocates, and former abolitionists joined forces to defeat such regulation bills in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. After their victory over the “regulationists,” moral reformers expanded the scope of their activities. Moving beyond the defensive effort to end state licensing of prostitution, they now aimed to abolish prostitution altogether and to establish a single standard of morality for men and women. The organization at the heart of this movement was the New York Committee for the Prevention of State Regulation of Vice, whose leaders included, among others, Abby Hopper Gibbons, Aaron Macy Powell, Anna Rice Powell, Emily Blackwell, and Elizabeth Gay. Although its membership was small and concentrated in the Northeast, the organization helped to publicize and coordinate purity reform efforts throughout the country through its journal, the Philanthropist . In 1895 the New York committee joined with other moral reform groups to form a national organization, the American Purity Alliance.³

Another important bastion of purity reform was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Founded in 1874 by middle-class Protestant women, the WCTU aimed to end trafficking in liquor, which its members considered a serious threat to the home and family. They focused on moral suasion and the conversion of drunkards to achieve their goals, and they also engaged in political campaigns for local temperance laws. When Frances Willard became president of the WCTU in 1879 (a position she held for the remaining twenty years of her life), the organization embraced a much broader program of social reform. Under Willard’s forceful and charismatic leadership, members campaigned for a wide range of issues in addition to temperance, including woman suffrage, prison reform, and the eight-hour day for workers. During this period of expansion, the WCTU also became a leader in the social purity crusade. In 1885 it established an official Social Purity Department whose purpose was to promote a single moral standard for both sexes. The WCTU brought great strength and experience to the social purity cause. With nearly 150,000 dues-paying members by 1892 and branches in every state, all major cities, and thousands of local communities, the WCTU was the largest women’s organization in the United States in the late nineteenth century.⁴

The WCTU and other purity organizations initially relied on moral education and voluntary efforts to stop the spread of prostitution and immorality. They established shelters and rescue homes to lead “fallen women” to a moral way of life. They also carried out preventive and protective work with younger women and girls to keep them from going astray in the first place. They formed travelers’ aid societies to direct young female migrants entering the cities to safe housing and employment. Various groups in cities throughout the country opened boarding homes to provide low-cost lodging and moral guidance for young women workers, and they organized social clubs such as the New Century Guild of Working Women in Philadelphia and the Working Girls’ Society in New York to offer wholesome entertainment in place of morally suspect urban amusements.⁵

Just as important as protective work with girls was the goal of transforming male sexual behavior and attitudes. Toward this end, WCTU members sponsored mothers’ meetings to teach women how to impart moral education to their children, particularly their sons. The mothers were urged to teach boys “that their virginity is as priceless as their sisters’.” Reformers also organized purity societies for young men to encourage them to resist sexual temptation. In 1885 Episcopal clergymen established the White Cross Society, modeled after a similar organization in England, to promote social purity among young men. With the enthusiastic support of the WCTU, branches of the White Cross were soon established in nearly every state and territory.⁶

Social purity leaders considered voluntary efforts and moral education important, but they became convinced that these methods alone were not sufficient to protect young women and to control male vice in American cities. They began to demand state attention to the problem with the organization of the age-of-consent campaign in 1885, an effort to convince the government to enforce their vision of moral order by making sexual relations with young women a criminal offense.

American groups were first alerted to the age-of-consent issue by the British purity movement. British reformers believed that an underground system of “white slavery” existed in London whereby English girls were abducted off the streets by evil procurers and forced into a life of prostitution. Around this time, purity activists on both sides of the Atlantic began to use the term “white slavery” to describe the sexual exploitation and prostitution of young women. In so doing, they followed established conventions of female reform associated since the early nineteenth century with abolitionism and women’s particular mission with regard to the end of slavery.⁷ Yet the term also clearly exposes the limitations of the moral protection campaign, pointing to its racist dimensions. By identifying the abolition of “white slavery” as their goal, reformers implied that only young white women needed protection from sexual harm and that only white women’s virtue was worth saving. This restricted ideological vision was fundamentally to shape the structure and the legal consequences of their movement.⁸

British purity activists sought to end the “white slave” traffic by demanding that Parliament raise the age of consent for females from thirteen to sixteen with the Criminal Law Amendment Act. When Parliament refused to pass the act, they enlisted the noted British journalist and reformer William T. Stead. Eager to use his pen to aid the purity cause, Stead published an exposé of the underground traffic in girls in the Pall Mall Gazette in the summer of 1885. Described by one historian as “one of the most successful pieces of scandal journalism published in Britain in the 19th century,” “The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon” described in vivid detail the entrapment and ravishing of “five-pound” virgins by lecherous aristocrats. To expose the evil of this system, Stead arranged to purchase a white working-class girl, Eliza Armstrong, from her mother, ostensibly for the purpose of prostitution. After the publication of the exposé, the police arrested Stead for abducting Eliza. Although they knew she was safe in a Salvation Army home, the police were anxious to punish Stead for the embarrassment he had caused them. He was found guilty and sentenced to three months in prison. Despite his arrest and imprisonment, Stead had succeeded in stirring the British public into action. After publication of “The Maiden Tribute,” a crowd estimated at 250,000 gathered at Hyde Park to demand legislation for the protection of young girls. Shortly thereafter, Parliament passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, raising the age of consent to sixteen.⁹

Stead’s exposé and subsequent arrest generated great interest and concern among purity reformers across the Atlantic. Although some disapproved of his methods, all praised his valiant effort to save young women and girls. In an article about Stead’s trial and sentencing, one reformer called him the “John Brown” of the “white slaves.”¹⁰ Already disturbed by Stead’s disclosures, American activists became even more alarmed when they discovered, several months later, that the legal age of consent in all states in their own country was even lower than that in England before the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. A survey of the laws conducted by WCTU member Georgia Mark revealed that in most states the age of consent was ten, in several others it was twelve, and in the state of Delaware the age was only seven (see Table 1). Mark presented her findings about American age-of-consent legislation in the Union Signal, the official journal of the National WCTU. “Those English laws that we have scarcely done condemning,” she stated, “were far in advance of our own legislation on this subject, and indeed, there never was a period in English history, from the most ancient times to the present, when girlish innocence was so early left undefended by the law as it is now in our own land.”¹¹

The age of consent in American law was based on previously established standards developed over the centuries in England. Under English common law, the age of female discretion was held to be twelve years. A parliamentary statute in 1576 lowered the age of consent in sexual relations to ten years and explicitly designate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Delinquent Daughters
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 ‘WHITE SLAVES’ AND ‘VICIOUS MEN’
• CHAPTER 2 TEENAGE GIRLS, SEXUALITY, AND WORKING-CLASS PARENTS
• CHAPTER 3 STATUTORY RAPE PROSECUTIONS IN CALIFORNIA
• CHAPTER 4 THE ‘DELINQUENT GIRL’ AND PROGRESSIVEM REFORM
• CHAPTER 5 MATERNAL JUSTICE IN THE JUVENILE COURT
• CHAPTER 6 ‘THIS TERRIBLE FREEDOM’
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX: A NOTE ON COURT RECORDS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• Series