NCJ Number
162582
Date Published
1995
Length
279 pages
Annotation
This work examines the gender, class, and racial tensions that accompanied campaigns to control adolescent female sexuality in America from 1885 to 1920.
Abstract
The author 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. The author rejects a simple hierarchical model of class control, and reveals a complex network of struggles and negotiations among women reformers, court and law enforcement officials, and working-class 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. Illustrations, tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, index