Making Right a Girl's Ruin: Working-Class Legal Cultures and Forced Marriage in New York City, 1890–1950

Journal of American Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 199-230

  Robertson, Stephen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

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EID: 85012506989     PISSN: 00218758     EISSN: 14695154     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875802006813     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. Statement of Elizabeth Tedesco, Brief, District Attorneys Closed Case File (hereafter DACCF) 188405 (1931) (Municipal Archives, New York City). I have altered the names of all the parties to the cases discussed in this article.
2. Rickie Solinger, Wake up Little Suzie : Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (New York: Routledge, 1992), 13, 177, 233 note 3.
3. William Forbath, Hendrick Hartog, and Martha Minnow, “ Introduction : Legal Histories From Below,” Wisconsin Law Review (1985), 764-65; Christopher Tomlins, “Subordination, Authority, Law: Subjects in Labor History,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 47 (1995), 66-67. For a critical discussion of the concept of legal culture, see Richard Ross, “The Legal Past of Early New England: Notes for the Study of Law, Legal Culture, and Intellectual History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 50: 1 (1993), 32-39.
4. Linda Gordon notes that social agencies often lacked the staff and the funds to give clients what they wanted. See Heroes of Their Own Lives : The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Penguin, 1988), 297-98.
5. Hendrick Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 4.
6. Ruth True, The Neglected Girl (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1914), 19. For the concept of “ ruin,” see Arthur Towne, “Young Girl Marriages in Criminal and Juvenile Courts,” Journal of Social Hygiene, 8 (July 1922), 292; Joan Jacobs Brumberg, “ ‘Ruined’ Girls : Changing Community Responses to Illegitimacy in Upstate New York, 1890-1920,” Journal of Social History, 18 (1984), 250; and John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 77.
7. DACCF 86286 (1911). For other examples of this middle-class attitude, see DACCF 189070 (1931), and William Robinson, America's Sex, Marriage and Divorce Problems (New York: Eugenics Publishing Company, 1934), 191-93. For other studies that argue that violence was an unexceptional part of working-class sexual culture, see Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion : Knowledge, Gender and Power in Modern America (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1994), 219; and Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution : The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 80-105, especially 89-92.
8. For examples of girls who talked of being “ in love,” see DACCF 188025 (1931) DACCF 209984 (1936) DACCF 229277 (1941) and DACCF 2297 (1946). On ideas about the nature of marriage, see D'Emilio and Freedman, 73-78. On the attitude of African American girls in the 1960s, see Solinger, 78-79.
9. William Whyte, “A Slum Sex Code,” American Journal of Sociology, 49 (July 1943), 26, 28.
10. American Journal of Sociology. For other cases in which families rejected a man's offer of marriage because they did not think that he could provide for the girl, see DACCF 189376 (1931) and DACCF 185689 (1931). For cases in which families rejected a man's offer because they considered he had a bad character, see DACCF 85730 (1911) DACCF 86225 (1911) and DACCF 3499 (1946). For cases where ethnic differences led parents to refuse a man's offer, see DACCF 9258 (1896) DACCF 111304 (1916) and DACCF 207416 (1936).
11. Abstract of Court of General Sessions Trial (December 29 1896), Court of General Sessions Case File (hereafter CGSCF), People v. W.S. (indicted December 1896) and DACCF 11881 (1896).
12. DACCF 84789 (1911). For other examples, see DACCF 11387 (1896) DACCF 35751 (1901) DACCF 83905 (1911) DACCF 86356 (1911) DACCF 109457 (1916) DACCF 108927 (1916) DACCF 110642 (1916) and DACCF 209984 (1936). For a discussion of the importance attached to the hymen by working-class families and their practice of taking girls to doctors to establish their virginity, see my “ Signs, Marks and Private Parts : Doctors, Legal Discourses and Evidence of Rape in the United States, 1823-1930,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 8 (January 1998), 345-88.
13. Transcript of Arraignment in Magistrates Court (April 18 1901), 4, in DACCF 34760 (1901).
14. Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion : The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 184, 211-13.
15. For private networks, the WCTU and private maternity homes, see Brumberg, “ ‘Ruined’ Girls. ” For private reformatories, to which families could send girls without recourse to the courts, see Alexander, Girl Problem, 172, note 44. For child guidance clinics, see Kathleen Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child : American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). For the new racial discourse of the 1940s, see Kunzel, 144-70.
16. For examples of men who made an offer of marriage at their arraignment, see DACCF 81568 (1911) DACCF 163661 (1926) DACCF 185920 (1931) and DACCF 209984 (1936). For the case of Michael Lione and Donna Gallo, see Trial Transcript Collection (hereafter TTC), Case 619, Roll 100 (1906), 10, 21, 39, 64, 90, 146-91, 240-42 (John Jay College of Criminal Justice).
17. Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Old Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 203.
18. For cases involving parents who had arranged marriages, but delayed having the ceremonies performed, see DACCF 186850 (1931) DACCF 1934 (1946) DACCF 3327 (1946) and DACCF 3755 (1946).
19. See Lawrence Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993) and Steinberg, Transformation of Criminal Justice.
20. Steven Schlossman and Stephanie Wallach, “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality : Female Juvenile Delinquency in the Progressive Era,” Harvard Educational Review 48: 1 (1978), 65-95; Alexander, Girl Problem; Odem, Delinquent Daughters and Edwards, Gendered Strife.
21. For the child protection movement's adoption of a social work approach, see Gordon, 34, 52, 60-81. As late as 1937, an investigation of the NYSPCC by Paul Blanshard, the New York City Commissioner of Accounts, attacked the Society for its failure to adopt the methods of social work, asserting its officers made “no attempt to adjust family situations, administer social treatment, or do case work.” Instead they immediately took cases to court. Blanshard's investigation also found that the Society did not require its staff to have any educational qualifications or experience, and as a result “only [two-tenths of one percent] of the work done is remedial in character to even a slight degree, and the remainder is law enforcement.” See New York Herald Tribune 5 Aug. 1937 (Mayor La Guardia's Scrapbooks, Roll 33 (Municipal Archives)) and the summary of the investigation prepared by E. S. Epstein, an Administrative Assistant to Mayor La Guardia, in Departmental Correspondence, Mayor's Office, Epstein, SPCC (1937), La Guardia Papers, Roll 521, 1718-1756 (Municipal Archives).
22. Assistant District Attorney's notes on trial testimony, 2, in DACCF 209984 (1936).
23. In 1951, for example, men admitted paternity in 837 of the 917 cases decided; see Association of the Bar of the City of New and Gellhorn, 198. For examples of cases in which the assistant district attorney recommended that defendants who had admitted paternity be discharged or allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, see DACCF 209817 (1936) and DACCF 229064 (1941).
24. “Wed When Jerome's Aid Threatened Jail,” New York American, 4 May 1906 (District Attorney's Scrapbook, Municipal Archives, New York City).
25. For grand jury nullification of statutory rape law, see my “ Sexuality through the Prism of Age: Modern Culture and Sexual Violence in New York City, 1880-1950,” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1998, 415, 421-23; and Morris Ploscowe, Sex and the Law (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1951), 190-91.
26. Transcript of Grand Jury hearing (Ap. 3, 1916), 3, 5-7, 9, 11, in DACCF 109238 (1916).
27. Towne, “Young Girl Marriages,” 293-94; Ploscowe, 185-86; Bertram Pollens, The Sex Criminal (New York: Macaulay, 1938), 159-63.
28. Paul Tappan, Delinquent Girls in Court : A Study of the Wayward Minor Court of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), 156-57, 161. For other discussions of the lack of uniformity among judges, see Association of the Bar of the City of New York and Walter Gellhorn, 170-1, 210-11.
29. Much of the evidence for the following argument is provided by the comments of Children's Court judges, rather than magistrates who sat in the criminal courts. Children's Court judges, who gained the power to decide whether girls under the age of sixteen could marry in 1925, were more influenced by modern ideas about childhood, which formed the premise for their courts, than their criminal court colleagues. As a result, they less consistently showed sympathy for efforts to arrange marriages. But when they did support marriages, they expressed beliefs more strongly held by criminal court judges.
30. For descriptions of teenage girls that emphasized the incongruity of their physical appearance and their age, see The Morning Journal, 16 Jul. 1886 (District Attorney's Scrapbook); The Morning Journal, 27 Oct. 1886 (District Attorney's Scrapbook); People v. Marks, 146 App. Div. 13 (1911) People v. Lammes, 203 N.Y.S. 741 (1924) and Memorandum, DACCF 35249 (1901). For the provision of the New York Penal Code, see Laws of New York, 1884, Ch. 46, 44.
31. Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference of the New York State Association of Judges of County Children's Courts (Albany: State of New York, 1928), 22.
32. Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference of the New York State Association of Judges of County Children's Courts.
33. “The Child Marriage Law in Operation,” Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference of the New York State Association of Judges of County Children's Courts (Albany: State of New York, 1931), 74-75.
34. Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference of the New York State Association of Judges of County Children's Courts (Albany: State of New York, 1928), 20.
35. In 1946, grand juries, usually following the direction of district attorneys, dismissed 61% (Nfl115) of the total number of prosecutions for statutory rape, including numerous cases in which the district attorney presented sufficient evidence to warrant an indictment; see my “ Sexuality through the Prism of Age,” 415. For the refusal of judges to grant permission to marry to ruined fourteen and fifteen year old girls, see “The Child Marriage Law in Operation,” Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference of the New York State Association of Judges of County Children's Courts (Albany: State of New York, 1931), 71.