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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpt from Chapter Twelve: The Day Virginity Died?
As the twentieth century wore on it became increasingly obvious that some women, regardless of their class or background, were voluntarily losing their virginities prior to marriage. Less obvious was whether their sexual conduct would be punished. Obviously many women must have experienced no particularly negative fallout. But other women were made to suffer horribly for sexual activity. For a minority of women, losing their virginity (or even being perceived to do so) before they were married became a one-way ticket not merely to the informal punishment of a "reputation" but to prosecution, involuntary hospitalization, or imprisonment.
What was the difference between the women who befell these harsher, more institutional fates and those who did not? Often it was a simple matter of getting caught. As ever, pregnancy was the ultimate tattletale. Shotgun marriage was even less simple a solution than it had been prior to the industrial revolution: the male partners of these hapless young women disappeared easily in the big cities, and increasingly efficient transportation networks also made for convenient male mobility in times of strife. Wartime made catching up to women's sex partners particularly difficult, and of course it was not always the case that the man in question would even return.
If a marriage could not be engineered, pregnant unmarried women were sometimes shipped off to live with relatives in other towns, where they would be unlikely to be recognized and could wait out their pregnancies in relative anonymity. In the absence of a family solution, they might end up in to homes for unwed mothers. These homes, typically run by philanthropic and/or religious groups, sought to help "fallen" girls by providing them with a safe place to wait out their pregnancies while they participated in programs and activities designed to rehabilitate them morally and mentally. Women who complied with this program, attending the prayer meetings and showing diligence during sessions of needlework and other domestic skills, who seemed eager to return home as dutiful daughters and expressed hopes of respectable wifehood were considered successes. Given appropriately repentant behavior, they were accepted back into their families and communities, although usually the price for this was that they had to hide their tawdry pasts forever.
As the century continued, unmarried mothers-to-be were assisted in their rehabilitation by members of a variety of medical and para-medical professions. The progressive reform movement had given birth to the profession of "social worker," and between social workers, physicians, and psychologists, there were a number of specialists who all worked with young women's sexuality from the standpoint that it was something that required professional expertise. As the work of historians like Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Mary Odem, and Joan Sangster has shown, the social work and juvenile justice systems of the early twentieth century took women's social problems and the sexual lives of young unmarried women as their special bailiwick. Whether these young women genuinely needed, let alone wanted, such help was hardly considered. Their behavior was socially disruptive, and that was cause enough. Thanks to the theorizing of many early psychologists, sexually non-normative behavior (meaning, for women, any sex outside of marriage) could be defined as pathological.
The motivation behind this pathologization of sexual activity was at root a merciful one, not intended to condemn. Rather than holding the disruptive person wholly responsible for immorality or sinfulness, the tendency now was to view the behavior as symptomatic of some sort of disorder. This way the person could be viewed not as a wrongdoer, but as a sufferer or victim. This view offered the hope that the condition, and therefore the symptoms, could be treated and cured. More than one writer hoped that a thorough understanding of these kinds of disorders would eventually let science deliver man from wrongdoing and evil. But in truth, it often merely meant that social norms and cultural deals were dressed up in empiricist clothing and given the weight of scientific fact. Failure to comply with social expectations of female sexual virtue was now an indicator that something was wrong that required intervention and treatment.
This was particularly true when the young woman was not particularly repentant. When young women relished rebellion, consistently defied parents, continued to profess feelings for men with whom they had had sex, did not seem interested in adopting the good-girl behavior expected of them, or refused to accept interventions or treatments from professionals, they were often labeled insane or incorrigible, and possibly also as a danger to themselves or others. Sometimes all it took to earn such a label was having a child out of wedlock, especially if the mother expressed the desire to keep and rear it. Sexual precocity, particularly when it was combined with other undesirable characteristics, was seen as an emblem of moral degeneracy, an outward symbol of a criminal nature, and a form of sociopathy.
This was even true in cases where no evidence of sexual activity could be brought. Joan Sangster's research on the Ontario women's penal system between 1920 and 1960 reveals numerous cases in which rebellious young women who had incurred the wrath of their parents or employers were sentenced to time in the Mercer Reformatory for Women on the mere presumption that since they were rebellious, they must have been engaging in illicit sex. In reality, their "crimes" might've involved things like spending time with men who were not white (one judge warned a young woman to "stay out of Chinese restaurants"), or running with what their parents perceived to be the wrong crowd. Regardless of the truth of the charge, "promiscuity" and "wantonness" would be included in the list of reasons that a woman should be punished for any perceived rebellion. Girls as young as eleven were sometimes sent to reformatory on such grounds; unsurprisingly, many of them were poor and not white and thus believed, thanks to the lingering legacy of social Darwinism, to be disposed to degeneracy and dissipation.
In the eyes of the social service and justice systems, "uncontrollable" or "incorrigible" women were assumed to be sexually active. And such "uncontrollable" behavior meant that these young women needed to be locked up. These incarcerations were frequently carried out as a matter of course once a case had been brought to the attention of police. Some parents who went to the police or to social service agencies seeking help in dealing with unruly daughters or hoping to frighten a teenager whom they'd just caught in flagrante delicto were shocked to discover the blind haste with which their daughters were whisked away to be "reformed." By the time some of these parents realized what was happening, it was too late for them to stop the turning cogs of the system.
Incorrigibility, in young women, was only sometimes a matter of repeated criminal fact. It could also be a convenient umbrella term that made it easy to dispose of inconvenient girls. In reality some young women who appeared to be perfectly respectable had sexual histories that would've gotten them labeled "incorrigible" if only the truth had been known, and not a few of the "incorrigibles" were in fact rather innocent. Neither sexual or criminal reputation were always a matter of demonstrable fact. Social context, a woman's conformity with normative feminine behavior, and other people's perception of her sexual morality mattered far more.
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I welcome anyone interested in translating any or all of these excerpts to do so, as long as you put them up on the Web and notify me of where they can be found. I plan to link all translated versions from this page.
Photos by Hanne. Site by Jhames