“The Crime of Precocious Sexuality” Celebrates Thirty Years : A Critical Appraisal

Three decades after the publication of “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality” it remains a classic in juvenile justice, criminal justice, and women’s history. At a time when only a handful of scholars had taken interest in the experiences of troubled females in the emerging juvenile justice system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Schlossman and Wallach carried out a broad sweep critical of the ideologies and practices shaping the lives of these girls across the United States. As they noted, turn of the century changes brought about by rapid industrialization, urbanization, and immigration as well as transformations in sexual conventions and customs, particularly as they pertained to females, alarmed the middle class, native-born whites known as Progressives. In response, Progressives initiated a series of paternalistic reforms aimed at curbing what Schlossman and Wallach identified as “precocious sexuality,” that is, sexual behavior threatening to bourgeois notions of gender and sexuality. Ultimately, these efforts discriminated against the poor, working class, ethnic females who appeared most frequently in juvenile courts of the day. The reforms also reinforced a sexual double standard that punished girls for even suggesting interest in sexual activity, while nearly exonerating boys from the same. In “Precocious Sexuality” Schlossman and Wallach concluded that girls continued to bear the brunt of sex discrimination, despite transformations in women’s rights and juvenile corrections in the 1960s and early 1970s.¹

Thirty years later paternalism continues to guide and inform the juvenile justice system. Scholars have shown that today, as in the past, girls end up in the juvenile justice system primarily for sexually based “crimes,” that is, for status offenses—acts deemed criminal based on the age of the offender. These offenses include running away, staying out late at night, and in other ways engaging in behavior that challenges parental authority. In most cases, status offenses are (as they have been in earlier periods) euphemisms for sexually related behavior deemed inappropriate both by the court and by parents.² Recent scholarship also demonstrates that girls—more so than boys—continue to suffer undue hardships for their transgressions. Juvenile corrections, then, in many ways enforces early twentieth century principles of gender and sexuality.³

To say that little has changed in the juvenile justice system in more than a hundred years is arguably ahistorical. Yet the links across time and space are striking and disturbing. The anniversary of “Precocious Sexuality” is an opportune moment to examine and analyze some of the continuities and changes, as well as the benefits and burdens of the system in place for young female offenders. As this discussion demonstrates, Schlossman and Wallach’s study did not, of course, emerge in a vacuum but rather was shaped by contemporary developments in academia and the larger society. To assess those and the more recent trends in the wake of “Precocious Sexuality,” this essay begins by exploring the scholarship and public policies of the 1960s and 1970s that informed Schlossman and Wallach’s study. Next, it probes the impact of their study on writings focusing on the rise of female delinquency, eugenics, and Progressive reform in the early twentieth century and on contemporary developments of the juvenile justice system in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Finally, the discussion highlights the areas of research that are still lacking and argues that more attention to the intersection of gender, class, race, and ethnicity is needed, especially given the rising proportion of girls of color in the juvenile correctional system in some of the most populous states, including New York, Texas, and California.

Female Juvenile Delinquency Comes of Age

At the time Schlossman and Wallach published “Precocious Sexuality,” public policy pundits and scholars had just begun to take notice of girls’ unique experience—vis-à-vis boys—in the juvenile justice system. Children and youth advocates argued that, whereas boys ended up in the system for property crimes, girls became entangled in the system for status offenses such as staying out late at night with unsavory characters. The passage of the Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDP) in 1974, which provided...