Delinquent daughters
Subtitle: protecting and policing adolescent female sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920
By: Mary E. Odem.
Series: Gender & American culture
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press; Univ of North Carolina Pr; The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 265
Subjects: Teenage girls -- United States -- Sexual behavior -- History; Sexual ethics -- United States -- History; Social problems -- United States -- History; Social control -- United States -- History; Middle class -- United States -- Sexual behavior -- Attitudes -- History; Working class -- United States -- Sexual behavior -- History
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [227]-253) and index.