In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • “Bright and Good Looking Colored Girl”: Black Women’s Sexuality and “Harmful Intimacy” in Early-Twentieth-Century New York
  • Cheryl D. Hicks (bio)

Mabel Hampton’s experiences in early-twentieth-century Harlem never quite measured up to the popular image that many New Yorkers (and later the world) held of the black neighborhood. In 1924, as a twenty-one-year-old resident, she knew that visitors from other parts of the city would go to “the night-clubs . . . and dance to such jazz music as [could] be heard nowhere else,” that the region’s major thoroughfares like Lenox and Seventh avenues were “never deserted,” while various “crowds skipp[ed] from one place of amusement to another.”1 Those crowds of primarily middle-class white voyeurs, fulfilling their own ideas about the primitiveness and authenticity of black life, enjoyed and came to expect Harlem’s “‘hot’ and ‘barbaric’ jazz, the risqué lyrics and the ‘junglelike’ dancing of its cabaret floor shows, and all its other ‘wicked’ delights.”2 As one black observer noted, after “a visit to Harlem at night,” partygoers believed that the town “never sle[pt] and that the inhabitants . . . jazz[ed] through existence.”3 Hampton’s everyday life, however, failed to coincide with these romanticized and essentialized stereotypes of black entertainment and urban life. A southern migrant, domestic worker, and occasional chorus [End Page 418] line dancer, she understood Harlem’s social and cultural complexities as she faced its pleasures, hardships, and dangers. Her time in Harlem also coincided with the historical moment when the neighborhood was touted by white New Yorkers as being one of the most sexually liberated urban spaces in the city.

Like that of most working-class women, however, Hampton’s social life, particularly her romantic attachments, faced more critical surveillance. With the increasing popularity of movies, dance halls, and amusement parks, community members and relatives became more concerned about how and with whom their young women spent their leisure time. Reformers and the police also attempted to regulate working-class women’s social lives and especially their sexuality. During World War I the federal government showed particular concern because of its fear that young women would spread venereal disease to soldiers, thereby physically weakening the armed forces and thus endangering the country’s war effort.4 General concerns about working-class women’s sexual behavior influenced the passing of numerous state laws that were shaped by reformers, approved by legislators, and enforced by police officers.5 As such, young working-class women’s interest in and pursuit of romance and sex caused various older adults unease not simply because such behavior rejected or ignored traditional courtship practices but also because evidence of sexual expression and behavior outside of marriage and outside the parameters of prostitution eventually constituted criminal activity.

Even though all working-class women were scrutinized for their pursuit of social autonomy and sexual expression, race and ethnicity influenced the nature of reformers’ and criminal justice administrators’ interactions with their charges. Immigrant and native-born white working-class women certainly were targeted by reformers and the police for questionable moral behavior, but generally authority figures believed these women could be reformed. Rehabilitative efforts were less of a guarantee for women who were characterized as innately promiscuous because of longstanding negative stigmas associated with their African ancestry and legacy of American enslavement. The fact that many African American women lived in Harlem, a neighborhood seen by white partygoers (and other New Yorkers) as a [End Page 419] center of social and sexual abandon, only reinforced the libidinous images of the neighborhood’s residents and influenced how police officers and criminal justice administrators assessed black women’s culpability in sexual offenses.

Young black women—incarcerated primarily for sex-related offenses on charges that included vagrancy, disorderly conduct, and prostitution—usually rejected reformers’ concerns and often believed they were unfairly targeted.6 Mabel Hampton, for example, contended that her imprisonment at the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills (hereafter Bedford) for solicitation stemmed from a false arrest. Other inmates revealed their own problems with law enforcement and, like Hampton, disagreed with the contention that their social behavior—in New York and especially...

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