Delinquent Daughters

Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920
2. Auflage 1995
ISBN: 978-0-8078-4528-8
Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 494 g

Reihe: Gender and American Culture

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Odem, Mary E.

Über Autor(innen)

Mary E. Odem (left) is an associate professor of history and women's studies at Emory University. She is the author of numerous publications on the subjects of women, gender, immigration, and ethnicity in U.S. history. Elaine Lacy (right) is professor of history and assistant to the executive vice chancellor at the University of South Carolina, Aiken. She has published numerous articles on Latino immigration to the United States and on Mexican cultural politics.