History 476

Devine

Spring 2016

Study Questions for Mary Odem, “Teenage Girls, Sexuality, and Working-Class Parents”

1. Many historians have argued that working-class attitudes about female sexuality were far less strict than those of middle-class Protestant reformers. To what extent does Mary Odem’s article support or refute this view?

2. What factors – economic, ethno-cultural, religious – drove working-class parents to exercise strict control over their daughters’ sexuality?

3. How did the “double standard” reveal itself in working-class attitudes about sex? How, according to Odem, did the sexual double standard also shape “law and custom”?

4. How did (1) the urban environment, (2) changes in the economy, and (3) the availability of “cheap amusements” contribute to the weakening of traditional limitations that working class families and communities had put on adolescent girls?

5. What reasons might a young girl have for wanting to leave home?

6. Why did working class families turn to the courts to control their daughters’ behavior? Why did some parents believe they had to take this step?

7. What does Odem mean when she says that working-class adolescent girls were far from the “helpless victims” portrayed in reformers’ accounts?

8. How did many young women challenge “prevailing conceptions of female sexual innocence”? In so doing, how were they also undermining Victorian notions of proper femininity?

9. How did young women use their sexuality to get what they wanted? Did this process empower or liberate them or did it facilitate their own exploitation by men?

Study Questions for J. Shoshanna Ehrlich, “Responding to the ‘Girl Problem’”

1. How did new laws – such as “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” – reflect shifting attitudes about youthful female sexuality?

2. How did ideas about “female desire” change between the Victorian era and the turn of the 20^th century?

3. Why did Progressive reformers consider environmental influences (where young women lived, worked, and played) “destructive of female morality”? How had the broader social trends of urbanization, immigration, and industrialization contributed to this erosion of traditional morality?

4. In the minds of Progressive reformers, how did race and “feeblemindedness” contribute to female promiscuity?

5. During the Progressive era, youthful “delinquency” was defined based on the delinquent’s gender. How does this reflect the existence of a sexual double standard or “gendered morality”?

6. Why was female delinquency and sexual promiscuity so threatening to Progressive era reformers? To what extent were their concerns about the “girl problem” projections of broader cultural anxieties?

7. Why were boys considered easier to “reform” than girls? Why were white girls considered easier to reform than African American girls? How were these assumptions reflected in the ways delinquents were treated?

8. How did Progressives know when a young girl had been successfully “reformed”?

9. Why did moral anxiety about the “girl problem” begin to diminish in the 1920s?