Respectability on Trial: Sex Crimes in New York City, 1900–1918 by Brian Donovan (review)

Sociologist Brian Donovan mined sex crime cases brought to trial in New York City during the first two decades of the twentieth century to give a grass roots view of the so-called first sexual revolution. He utilized the Trial Transcript Collection at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, an extraordinary treasure trove of over 3,300 trial court transcripts. These were cases tried in New York County's main criminal court, the Court of General Sessions, then the "busiest criminal court in the world" as it handled all felonies for that jurisdiction. (15). His study looks very closely at seventy-five cases in the four categories of violation (defined by law): seduction, forcible rape, sodomy, and compulsory prostitution. His cases represent almost all the seduction and sodomy cases from the collection, but he only utilized a small number of the rape and compulsory prostitution transcripts. Donovan excluded sodomy and rape cases where the complainant was under the age of sixteen to limit the scope of the study. He also only looked at the compulsory prostitution cases from 1908 to 1915. His desire to limit the cases is understandable as the seventy-five he uses translates to "approximately sixteen thousand pages" of transcripts. Donovan leavened the transcripts with other sources: records from the municipal archives, newspapers, and other printed sources (note 19, p. 184). His conclusions align with the work of most gender scholars who have worked in this field and laid out the contours of the sexual ideologies and practices of the early twentieth century. His conclusions from sex crimes prosecutions in early twentieth-century New York City prompt rethinking of the historical period, complicating the characterization of an era as one of progress or regression.

Like many before him, Donovan uses legal sources as they "contain a wealth of information about the culture and practices of ordinary New Yorkers" during a period when ideas about sexuality and gender were changing dramatically (5). Donovan knows the records he draws upon were mediated by the process of being captured in shorthand and then being typed into transcripts from notes, and that they were created to meet the needs of individuals within the legal system. As such, he combs them to show intense micro-social interactions of contrasting views revealed by questions or repeated returning to a point by counsel. To capture those exchanges, he includes a great number of block quotes from the transcripts to zoom "in for the you-are-there experience of line-by-line dialogue" (7). He is a sophisticated guide to the materials. To Donovan the transcripts are records of storytelling of a particular type: they had "the character of post-modern narrative with fragmented images sketched through" the question and response format. They are less valuable for telling what happened than they are "as imprints of particular ideas about sex, gender, men, and women" (5). His work does much to show the interlocking relationship between gender ideology and the law. Legal institutions and ideologies shored up inequality and defined sexual majorities and minorities; they also mitigated some of the harsher aspects of repressive sexual laws.

His treatment of seduction cases shows the value of his approach. Seduction was made a criminal offence by the agitation of social justice reformers in the nineteenth century. The statute law made it a crime if a man "under promise of marriage, or by means of a fraudulent representation to her that he is married to her, seduces and has sexual intercourse with an unmarried female of previous chaste character" (37). It was more than a criminalization of an older practice of fathers using tort law (civil suits for damages) when their daughters had been seduced. In that case, if the seducer agreed to marry the victim the civil suit was dropped. The criminal law had been shaped with reformers' vision in mind of men of power through promises or trickery seduced...