Overview
Delinquent Daughters explores the gender, class, and racial tensions that fueled campaigns to control female sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Mary Odem looks at these moral reform movements from a national perspective, but she also undertakes a detailed analysis of court records to explore the local enforcement of regulatory legislation in Alameda and Los Angeles Counties in California. From these legal proceedings emerge overlapping and often contradictory views of middle-class female reformers, court and law enforcement officials, working-class teenage girls, and the girls' parents.Exploring the gender, class and racial tensions that fueled campaigns to control female sexuality in late 19th- and early 20th-century America, Odem traces two distinct stages of moral reform. She also adresses the paradoxical consequences of reform by demonstrating that the protective measures advocated by middle-class women often resulted in coercive and discriminatory policies toward working-class girls.
Editorials
From the Publisher
A highly readable, lively, and accessible work.American Journal of Legal History
A rich narrative work that is attentive to issues of gender, ethnicity, race, and class.
Journal of Social History
A book that could, and should, be read by the beginner and the expert in a variety of fields.
Choice
As we think freshly about juvenile justice and social policy, this book should be most welcome.
Linda K. Kerber, coeditor of U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays