Sex, Gender, and the History of the Adolescent Body: 30 Years after “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality”

Thirty years ago “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality” dropped a bomb on juvenile and criminal justice studies. Invisible girl offenders suddenly appeared, their differential treatment by the juvenile justice system revealed. In its examination of the Progressive era—one in which juvenile justice emerged and girls’ sexuality garnered unprecedented attention—the article highlighted the trends of policing girls’ sexuality and the overincarceration of mostly working-class girls for “crimes” of sexual expression. Importantly, it showed that by collapsing girls’ bad behavior with their sexual precociousness, juvenile justice authorities contributed to the idea that a girl’s value hinged on her future marriageability and the essentialist notion that her purpose—ironically—was to reproduce. In attempting to answer why this gendered treatment emerged, the authors pointed to an historical context in which new theories of adolescence, a politics of eugenics, and social purity goals permeated juvenile justice thinking and institutions charged with treating wayward teens. Today Schlossman and Wallach’s revelations about chivalric justice and sexual discrimination may not seem the stuff of headline news, but in 1978 girls both historically and contemporaneously flew under the radar as unimportant historical agents and political subjects. Considered “too few to count,” adolescent girls had been ignored in juvenile justice scholarship, which had prioritized class and ethnic biases of a system that seemed to be about dependent and delinquent boys.

Given that the article was published in a decade that saw the growth and institutionalization of women’s history and feminist studies, it’s not surprising that girls and women in conflict with the law, and girls more generally, at last received due attention. “Precocious Sexuality” became part of an expanding body of literature centered on women’s penal institutions and the regulation of women’s criminal behavior, especially prostitution, providing ample evidence of the gendered nature of criminal justice.¹ At the same time, practitioners of the new social history subfield on the history of sexuality also looked to legal institutions to plumb the depths of sexual regulation endemic in North American society.² During the 1980s this field at the nexus of sexuality studies and historical criminology blossomed, demonstrating not only how justice was not blind but that patriarchy and a double sexual standard led to the sexualization of the female offender.

The main ideas and arguments made by Schlossman and Wallach in “Precocious Sexuality” were borne out by important books on “sexual delinquents” that showed how girls were processed by the court and their bodies prescribed gendered and sexual difference which shaped the kind of examination given, treatment afforded, and judgment rendered. ³ Beyond the gender discrimination inherent in the legal regulation of girls, we now know the extent to which the state, acting through the juvenile court and with a variety of female maternal justice authorities, literally and figuratively probed girls’ bodies for their stories of early sexual experience. We can therefore identify historic patterns of girls’ sexual behavior and attitudes towards sexuality of both the interrogators and those interrogated. We can find evidence that sexuality was for girls both liberating and oppressive, part of their lives that they both controlled and felt they had little control over. Investigations into the policing of crimes of precocious sexuality eventually made links to broader discussions of girlhood history. One of the most important points raised in these discussions is that we needed to know more about girls’ lives and which girls found themselves in trouble with the law. Despite the apparent consistency of juvenile justice systems tending to the “problem” of girls’ sexual precociousness across time and geography, gender historians have revealed how, as an analytical category, “girl” is “unstable.”⁴ That is, although their gender resulted in a focus on their sexuality in the juvenile justice system, other critical identities such as race, ethnicity, religion, and class influenced judgments about their sexuality and ideas about appropriate treatment.⁵

Implicitly, “Precocious Sexuality” and more recent studies pointed to an important yet overlooked aspect of this history and politics: the centrality of the child’s or adolescent’s body in...