Introduction

“Students, private school Semsülmekâtib.” The photograph is part of a survey taken in the Ottoman Empire between 1880–93. The collection highlights educational, military and government facilities as well as historic sites. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Abdul Hamid II Collection, Number: LC-USZ62–81452.

In February 1978, when “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality: Female Juvenile Delinquency in the Progressive Era” first appeared in the Harvard Educational Review, scholars had just begun to examine the histories of childhood, youth, juvenile delinquency, and juvenile justice.² These early works advanced most of the basic claims that have become central to the field of childhood history, not least of which was the discovery that childhood had a history worth exploring at all. In his seminal Centuries of Childhood (1962), Philippe Ariès linked the emergence of childhood “innocence” to shrinking family sizes and new modes of childrearing among the Enlightenment-era middle classes of Western Europe.³ While questioning several of Ariès’s assumptions, the first wave of childhood historians produced an array of beautifully written studies of children, adolescents, and families in a variety of historical settings. Thanks to John Demos, we learned a great deal about the ways in which boys and girls experienced rites of passage into adulthood in Puritan New England. Neil Sutherland explored the shift from economic to emotional attachments to children in nineteenth and twentieth century Canada. Paula Fass outlined the contours of American youth culture and the anxieties it elicited from adults during the 1920s, and Joseph Kett traced the historical development of the life course of adolescence from the colonial to the modern period in United States history.⁴

A large subset of this early scholarship focused on the history of juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice. Historians explained how the chancery courts, houses of refuge, and reformatories of the antebellum period gave way to the juvenile court movement of the 1890s. They described the concerns of the Progressive “child savers,” comprised of middle and upper class, native-born Protestant women and professional men, whose efforts were largely responsible for opening the nation’s first juvenile court in Chicago in 1899. Perhaps most notably, scholars mapped out, in devastating detail, the gulf between the hopeful rhetoric of reformers and the often brutal reality of the juvenile justice system they created. In this endeavor, scholars undoubtedly were influenced by contemporary events; during the 1960s and 70s, juvenile justice became a symbol for arbitrary, punitive adult authority. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of rulings, mandated the introduction of due process protections into the juvenile court. In 1974, Congress created the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to promote the best practices in state and local jurisdictions. A series of abuse scandals rocked juvenile detention centers and training schools across the nation, promulgating de-institutionalization campaigns in states such as Massachusetts, Missouri, and Texas.⁵ At the same time, academics in a range of disciplines argued that juvenile delinquency was a social construction that often became a stalking horse for racial, ethnic, and class prejudices. One can find echoes of these developments in the thoughtful expositions of Anthony Platt, Robert Mennel, Steven Schlossman, and David J. Rothman.⁶

However, one area rarely explored in these early works was gender. To be sure, scholars outlined the differences in arrests, offense categories, and numbers of delinquent boys and girls. They offered anecdotal evidence that girls were penalized in different ways than boys but rarely pushed further toward a systemic analysis of gender differences or “gendering” of delinquency. Moreover, at the time that “Precocious Sexuality” appeared, the field of women’s history was in its early stages, and, as Joan Scott would note several years later, few if any scholars analyzed historical subjects through the lens of gender.⁷ The article was perhaps the first to illustrate the disproportionate role that adolescent female sexuality played in the Progressive imagination and the ways in which reformers attempted to use juvenile justice to control sexually active girls from working...