Showing Its Age

When I first read “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality,” it was the end of the line. I was a graduate student, working through the footnotes of Mary Odem’s Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920, researching a dissertation on the prosecution of sexual violence in early twentieth-century New York City.¹ In Schlossman and Wallach’s article I found what I already knew from reading Odem’s book: that the immigrant, working-class girls who appeared in the juvenile courts, unlike their male counterparts, were almost always charged with immorality, an offense that encompassed not only acts but signs deemed to indicate the potential for immoral behavior; that those girls suffered invasive medical and judicial examinations of their sexuality; that those examinations led to harsher treatment than dispensed to boys—commitment to reformatories rather than probation; and that new ideas about adolescence and campaigns to regulate sexuality lay behind efforts to control sexually delinquent girls. Looking for more, I went to Steven Schlossman’s Love and the American Delinquent and found almost no reference at all to girls. I added “Precocious Sexuality” to my footnotes and filed it, another piece of scholarship whose foundational work earned it only a too-brief acknowledgement.

Rereading the article, I’m struck by how much wider its reach is than I remember, extending beyond juvenile courts to reformatories and out to the eugenic and social purity movements. In doing so, Schlossman and Wallach made connections that have been lost in the increasingly more specialized scholarship of the last thirty years, most notably between sex education campaigns and the juvenile courts. The extent of that analysis created a remarkably solid foundation for a gendered interpretation of juvenile justice, on which has been built a significant new literature on the treatment of adolescent girls. But for all this breadth, there is one major gap in the context they develop for the new concern with female sexual delinquency. A central plank of the social purity movement was a campaign to increase the age of consent, the age below which the law treated girls as being unable to consent to sexual intercourse, from ten years to sixteen or eighteen years. The first wave of those campaigns predated the Progressive Era, but they crested again in the early twentieth century, a period that also saw extensive enforcement of the age of consent. By criminalizing sex with an underage girl, statutory rape was literally a “crime of precocious sexuality,” and, although it held the male not the female participant legally responsible, it was an obvious counterpart to juvenile court prosecutions of sexual delinquency. Mary Odem focused precisely on that overlap in Delinquent Daughters, which is what originally drew me to her book, and hence to “Precocious Sexuality.” I was in search of the relationship between girls brought to juvenile courts as defendants and those appearing in criminal courts as victims.²

Schlossman and Wallach’s omission of the age of consent debate results in the absence from their article of any discussion of the category of age. There is only one mention of age in the article, a comment that “Most inmates of female reformatories were fifteen or sixteen years old, too young to marry in most states”³ (76). Not even the ages over which the juvenile court had jurisdiction are specified. This absence reflects a persistent tendency among historians, even those who study childhood, to employ broad age-based stages like child, girl, and adult. In this article, Schlossman and Wallach couple those categories with a vocabulary of precocity. What that concept effectively highlights is the way that girls’ behavior challenged the boundary between age groups: “By usurping the ultimate adult prerogative—sexual intercourse—female delinquents forfeited their right to be regarded merely as innocent, curious children” (84). What they missed as a result of this emphasis on precocity is the instability and fluidity of those life stages and their boundaries, which instead appear natural and fixed. To the contrary, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Americans differed over the nature of childhood, over who was a child, over where...