Response to Critics: Rethinking “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality”

Let us begin by thanking the editors for the opportunity to re-think the arguments we developed thirty years ago in order to call historians’ attention to the intersection of sexuality, delinquency, and juvenile justice in the Progressive Era. Close re-reading of one’s work three decades later is inevitably a humbling experience—less because of inadvertent errors than because of conceptual blinders that we didn’t know we were wearing and because we wrote in a polemical tone that conflicted with our heuristic goals. Tamara Myers is correct: we were trying to “drop a bomb” on prior scholarship in both women’s history and the history of criminal justice. We were also trying to demonstrate tighter links between past and present than contemporary policy analysts had recognized. But a more subdued rhetoric would have carried the main points just as well!

We think (though of course we can’t be sure) that we invented the term “precocious sexuality.” Our goal was to create a single phrase that captured the distinctive Progressive-Era mindset, and the policy framework that emerged from it, that lumped together all varieties of sexual experience/expression by pre-pubescent and pubescent (unmarried) girls as warranting deep public concern and intervention.¹ Having settled on a term, we sought to demonstrate that it embodied both a complex set of ideas and a directive for social action—most consequentially, in the recently established juvenile courts. “Precocious sexuality,” we argued, was treated as if it were a “crime” by juvenile courts, that is, a sufficient reason to place girls—but not boys—under court-supervised probation or incarcerate them in a sexually segregated, private or public reform school.² “Precocious sexuality” also provided a rationale for holding girls in pre-hearing detention, often for lengthy periods, in order to perform medical investigations of their bodies for physiological hints of prior sexual behavior and to evaluate each girl’s amenability to future correction by the court or a custodial institution.

Hence, “the crime of precocious sexuality” was our shorthand for arguing that profound gender differences shaped the design and practice of early twentieth-century juvenile courts. It also provided a rationale for building an all-too-brief empirical demonstration that girls received harsher treatment than boys in juvenile courts—i.e., less probation, more long-term incarceration—even though their behaviors were less obviously “criminal” than the misdemeanors and felonies that most boys had committed. A bit to our surprise, given the paucity of hard data at our command in 1978, the rough estimates that we calculated regarding the juvenile courts’ differential treatment of boy versus girl delinquents have stood up and been confirmed by other scholars—so far, at least.³

The subtitle of our essay also warrants a brief comment. Wisely or not, our study had narrow and sharp chronological boundaries: “female juvenile delinquency in the Progressive Era.” We did not agree with Peter Filene’s legendary eagerness in 1970 to write an “Obituary for ‘The Progressive Movement,’” but we also chose not to engage the hot debates at the time about the proper periodization of the Progressive Era.⁴ Our “Progressive Era” conformed loosely to the first and extraordinarily popular generation of juvenile courts, 1899 to 1920.⁵

So much for preliminaries. The three commentators have chosen to focus on different aspects of “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality,” and in order to give all their due, we will address each author’s comments separately.

Miroslava Chávez-García

We would like to comment on three elements that Miroslava Chávez-García points out from “Precocious Sexuality.”

First, her observation that we “carried out a broad sweep of the ideologies and practices shaping the lives of girls across the United States.” Of course, we did not in 1978 have the advantage of Kathy Peiss’s path-breaking book Cheap Amusements on the social experiences of working girls in the early twentieth century.⁶ Frankly, it never occurred to us to embed our analysis of “ideologies and practices” in the rich setting of delinquent girls’ everyday...