Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age (review)

It would seem that the subject of the South has been reviewed, discussed, debated, stretched, pushed, and finally exhausted in the barrage of books in the last few decades. Susan Cahn, however, has managed to find not only a southern subject that has not been looked at, but one that is enlightening and disturbing in many ways: the sexuality of adolescent girls in the first half of the twentieth century.

The images of Scarlett and Melanie have dominated the South's cultural stereotypes, but beyond these pat images is the truth about poor white and poor black girls in the South. In a society where sexuality in a young white woman was seen as deviant—a sign of mental deficiency—and sexuality in a young black woman was seen as normal but a sign of racial inferiority, the battle in the first half of the century was fraught with an especially charged quality. Race, class, and gender all came together in the battle over the sexuality of young women.

Cahn's second chapter, "Spirited Youth or Fiends Incarnate" is a compelling story of adolescent rebellion that speaks to two of these issues—class and gender. Cahn chronicles the tale of Samarcand Manor, a "training school" in Moore County, North Carolina. In March of 1931, sixteen teenage girls set fire to their cottages in an effort to reveal to the public the deplorable conditions in the school and the mistreatment of the girls living there—girls who were stripped, beaten, locked in solitary confinement, and sometimes starved because of their various "crimes," ranging from vagrancy to sexual promiscuity, disobedience to parents, and even one stormy of a girl who was apparently sent there because she was the victim of incest and the state didn't know where else to send her. A trial ensued, but the real battle took place in the minds of southerners as they tried to come to terms with young women and sexuality. Were these girls just expressing the normal sexuality of adolescent girls who had recently been freed to express it, or were they "fiends incarnate," as one writer claimed?

Most of the sexually active girls were poor whites, of course, but they had their counterparts in the African American community. While it took more time for states to fund reformatory schools for black girls, mainly because white lawmakers believed that "black girls were by nature sexually promiscuous, making any efforts at rehabilitation futile" (Cahn 70), black girls were eventually subject to the same contemptible treatment. The two stereotypes of the virtuous white southern woman and the black temptress refused to die, and it took decades for southerners to admit neither one stood up very well under scrutiny. Especially shocking is the attempts of states to sterilize poor white girls in an effort to keep the gene pool pure—and poor black girls to keep them from "breeding."

Cahn's book easily moves from decade to decade, looking at the "pick-up girls" of World War II to the bobby-soxers of the 50s, examining the role of popular culture on the ideas that girls had of themselves as well as that southerners had of the girls, especially with the introduction of rock 'n' roll. Here religion took a front seat in the demonizing of youthful dancing and listening to music with sexually suggestive lyrics and a primal beat. Elvis Presley was only the beginning, but he was especially significant in bringing together blacks and whites under one musical umbrella. This "collective embrace of rock 'n' roll posed a genuine threat to the social order" (Cahn 267). (In an interesting foreshadowing of today's religious capitalistic advertising, one religious tract asked whether Jesus would dance if he were alive today.)

The idea of sexuality was never far from the thoughts of the public when it came to adolescent girls, both black and white, and the prejudices played an important role in the integration of schools. Cahn reminds the reader that at...