“The Queer Politics of Managing Youth and Sex in the 1920s United States”

by Nick Syrett, University of Northern Colorado

This panel explored the ways that reformers, mental health professionals, and reform schools regulated young people in the decade of the 1920s, especially in regards to their sexuality. While the primary focus was on adults’ understandings of childhood, adolescence, and sexuality, there were also crucial moments of youthful agency revealed by the panelists, and of course that was one of the elements that most disturbed the adults who attempted to regulate them.

Don Romesburg, an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Sonoma State University gave a paper entitled “Wayward Sexualities, Delinquent Mentalities, and Early 20th-Century Youth Experts.” In it he focused on the way that experts treated delinquent boys and girls who exhibited queer tendencies, including same-sex sexual behavior, differently from other kinds of delinquent youth. The former group was more likely to be segregated within institutions and be subject to surgical intervention and diagnoses of psychopathy. Treatments for those understood as seducers (as opposed to seduced) were particularly dire. Romesburg provocatively suggests that we need to look to the early twentieth century for the origins of the sexual psychopath; that figure, emerging later in the 1920s, was built on the backs of psychological and penal discourses about incarcerated queer youth in the 1910s and early ‘20s.

I, Nick Syrett, an assistant professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado, gave a paper called “Child Marriage and Contests Over Non-Normative Sexuality in the 1920s.” Using the celebrated case of “Peaches and Daddy” – the 1926 marriage of a 15 year-old working class girl to a 51 year-old NYC real estate magnate – and the work of New York-based child marriage reformers, I argued that concerns over child marriage reflected worries about changes in female adolescent sexuality more broadly. I also demonstrated the differences between reformers’ treatment of girl wives in comparison to their reactions to sexually active single girls: they cast them as victims, refusing to recognize their agency, precisely the problem in the case of the single girls. Both sets of reformers, however, were dealing with the same issue: increasing sexual self-assertion by younger women.

Allison Miller, a Ph.D. candidate in History at Rutgers University, gave a paper entitled “Therapeutic Discipline and Queer Youth in a School for Delinquent Girls, c. 1926.” In a fascinating case study of renowned prison reformer Miriam Van Waters and one of her charges at the El Retiro School for Girls, a queer girl named “Johnnie,” Miller demonstrated the ways that what she calls “therapeutic discipline” was marshaled by prison officials like Van Waters to regulate and to reform the girls who were incarcerated at “schools” like El Retiro. Using Van Waters’ own phrase to describe her interactions with girls at El Retiro and elsewhere, “virile warmth,” Miller elaborates the ways that a form of transference and queer fellow feeling became one of the tools used by Van Waters and other juvenile justice workers in order to do their reform work. In some cases it succeeded so well that Van Waters and others maintained correspondence with former inmates for many years after their incarceration.

Amanda Littauer, an assistant professor of History and Women’s Studies at Northern Illinois University, commented on the papers, prodding each of us to think about some of our claims, and situating them in relation to certain other works in the historiography. A lively conversation then ensued, focusing on changing notions of childhood and adolescence; the figure of the sexual child; the role of parents in regulating sexuality in children; the growth of state intervention in the lives of youth; the specters of intergenerational sex; and the understandings that guided reformers in their work with sexual children. How much did these reformers acknowledge the sexuality of their charges? And how often did they refuse to acknowledge it? These shared themes made for a really valuable discussion, even as the papers themselves took different material as their subjects.