Bad Girls

Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties

Amanda H. Littauer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781469623788
• eBook ISBN: 9781469623795
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

In this innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier. From World War II–era “victory girls” to teen lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s, these nonconforming women and girls navigated and resisted intense social and interpersonal pressures to fit existing mores, using the upheavals of the era to pursue new sexual freedoms.

Building on a new generation of research on postwar society, Littauer tells the history of diverse young women who stood at the center of major cultural change and helped transform a society bound by conservative sexual morality into one more open to individualism, plurality, and pleasure in modern sexual life.

Chapter One: Victory Girls

Sex, Mobility, and Adventure on the Home Front

Manless? Are you kidding? As for the girls in my crowd, it’s a major one night, a captain another, and cadets and sergeants and corporals and, O Lord …

—San Antonio woman interviewed by Time magazine, 1945

“Annie” was “a plump countrified [white] girl of seventeen with a jolly smile and twinkling brown eyes,” wrote a San Antonio social worker. Annie first came to Texas after running away from Ohio, but juvenile authorities sent her home. Nine months later she returned, visiting and working short stints at cafés and “beer joints.” She then went with two truck drivers to Oklahoma, where she joined a carnival and traveled for ten days. When she headed to the health department to get her work permit, she was diagnosed with gonorrhea. The Travelers Aid Society (TAS) director tried to convince Annie to go home, but the girl explained that she had two soldier boyfriends in San Antonio and did not want to leave. She admitted she had been “promiscuous” in relationships with other men as well. The social worker noted, “She says that she loves her mother and family, but she has had so much excitement that she is not contented to remain at home under her mother’s supervision.”¹ Like girls and women across the nation, Annie drew upon her sexual resources, seeking relationships and encounters that promised to satisfy her needs, desires, and impulses. Moving through multiple states, forming sexual relationships with soldiers and civilian men, working in taverns and cafés, and reveling in adventure, Annie exemplified the “victory girl” stereotype: adolescent, patriotic, rebellious, free-spirited, and out for a good time.

A social worker in Leesville, Louisiana, uncovered the story of another wartime woman named Mabel Corrina Vincent. The interview took place in jail after Vincent was arrested for vagrancy. Twenty-five years old, she was married to a soldier who sent her fifteen dollars each month; the couple’s daughter was living with a paternal aunt. Vincent admitted that she began selling sex at the instigation of her friends and that she had had intercourse with seven soldiers. Police tracked her down after a sergeant reported her as the probable source of his venereal infection. Vincent insisted that she never took money from soldiers, because she felt sorry for them. Everybody is after their money, she explained; she even paid for her own food and drinks when she went out on dates with servicemen. When asked about her future, she said that she wanted to learn to weld and to work in the defense industry.² As a wife, mother, prostitute, and casual sexual partner, Vincent embodied both the complexity of wartime sexual life and the challenge that women’s behaviors posed for the federal officials who struggled—largely unsuccessfully—to limit servicemen’s sexual contacts with civilian women.

Because the discourse of the victory girl centered around the fear of patriotically motivated juvenile sexual delinquency, Annie’s story would likely have been more familiar to wartime Americans than Vincent’s, but both narratives illustrate how the nation’s military mobilization expanded young women’s access to casual sexual encounters. This chapter inquires into the social and sexual lives of women like Annie and Vincent, who were subjected to public scrutiny, analysis, and control as part of the wartime social protection campaign. With a handful of recent exceptions, such stories have not made it into scholarly histories of women in World War II, which tend to focus on female industrial workers, employment discrimination, military service, family life, and social control.³ Young women left only traces of their own perspectives in the historical record, but through the eyes of researchers, policy-makers, enforcement agents, and social workers, it is possible to view a remarkable range of interactions and encounters between young civilian women and servicemen. Together, these actors defied not only social norms but also the authorities that attempted to classify, manage, and restrain young people’s sexual acts and attitudes. World War II left a legacy of young female sexual self-assertion that would generate both conservative and liberal responses in the postwar years, inspiring calls for female sexual autonomy during the “sexual revolution” to come.

Increasing Sexual Activity among Wartime Girls and Young Women

Americans during World War II were preoccupied with the number of teen girls and young women having sex with servicemen. Although historians have debated whether rates of heterosexual premarital sex actually rose during the war or whether such conduct simply became more visible, my research suggests that both developments were occurring simultaneously.⁴ Wartime conditions offered unprecedented opportunities for adolescent girls and young women to engage in sexual relationships with young men, especially servicemen. Because of the scope of the war and the serious concern that venereal disease would cripple the war effort, organizations like the Federal Security Agency’s Social Protection Division (SPD) and the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) measured the extent of casual sex during World War II more systematically than anyone had before. In their attempts to raise public awareness and support for the social protection program, federal officials courted media attention, raising the profile of non-marital sexuality.

Average Americans also worried that the war would promote juvenile delinquency and sexual promiscuity. The Director of the Office of Community War Services commented on the thousands of newspaper items about “shocking!” examples of juvenile delinquency that his office received.⁵ American magazines published over twelve hundred articles in the first half of 1943 alone on the subject of juvenile delinquency, the majority of which focused on white youth (although some moralizing was directed at girls of color).⁶ One of the few articles on victory girls published in an African American newspaper demonstrates the concerned and disapproving tone of the genre: “Girls … roam the streets, loving men for a night or an hour. They search for the bright lights and bars; seeking the thrills of new faces and new sensations. Patriotism to them is a cheap affair.”⁷

The result of media coverage was widespread and intense scrutiny not only of the usual “delinquent” suspects—poor girls and girls of color—but also of white, middle-class girls, who did not appreciate it. In a letter to the editor, sixteen-year-old Anne Meltzer from Newburgh, New York, protested the atmosphere of suspicion: “It is getting so that every young girl seen talking to a service man is looked on with disdain by all adults.… It also seems to have become a crime to stand on a main street at night. One evening while waiting in front of a movie with two of my friends for my parents a man came up to us and said that it was time we were home in bed.”⁸ To the frustration of girls like Melzer, newspaper coverage created unprecedented awareness that young women—and adolescent girls—were enjoying erotically charged interactions with young men.

On the question of how much more sex teen girls were having during the war than before, research data is only somewhat more reliable than newspaper coverage. The legal definition of juvenile delinquency varied widely. Only a third of counties in the United States had juvenile courts in 1943, and juvenile court statistics include only the cases that made it to the courtroom. Girls who were arrested because of their sexual conduct could be formally charged in several different ways, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics measured incidents of police activity rather than criminal acts. Frequent wartime migrations could exaggerate increases in delinquency, while police practices could understate it, since social workers urged police to handle adolescent offenders without recourse to the courts, and arresting officers recorded arrests of adolescents inconsistently.⁹ Class and race influenced data collection in erratic ways. Police often handled white girls from middle- and upper-class families “unofficially” while employing the justice system to discipline girls with less racial and socioeconomic privilege.¹⁰ However, in some communities, especially in the South, police felt that it was more important to protect the health of white servicemen than black and therefore ignored black women and girls and reserved crowded detention facilities for whites. Tolerance toward commercial and casual sex in black neighborhoods could also have been a way to keep black men from turning to white women for sex.¹¹

Despite these inconsistencies and limitations, statistical evidence supports the likelihood that adolescent girls were, in fact, engaging in more sexual activity than before the war. The FBI, the National Probation Association, the U.S. Children’s Bureau, the American Social Hygiene Association, and the Social Protection Division all identified substantial increases in reports of juvenile female delinquency between 1940 and 1945, most of which were sexual in nature. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports claimed that the percentage of girls under age twenty-one arrested for sex-related offenses increased by 130 percent between 1941 and 1943.¹² The National Probation Association reported that there was a 23 percent increase in delinquency among girls from 1942 to 1944 (as compared to 5.2 percent among boys).¹³ The U.S. Children’s Bureau maintained that girls’ cases in sixty-nine juvenile courts rose by 49 percent in 1942, by 89 percent in 1943, and by 82 percent in 1944; six out of ten of those cases fell into the categories of “sex offense” or of “running away” or “being ungovernable,” which were legal euphemisms for sexual delinquency.¹⁴ SPD researchers found that between 1940 and 1944, juvenile “sex cases” and charges of “being ungovernable” rose by 51 percent and 54 percent respectively. “Running away” increased by 101 percent during a time when all “delinquent girl” cases went up by 75.6 percent.¹⁵ Taken together, these numbers suggest substantial evidence for girls’ and young women’s pronounced sexual activity on the wartime home front.

The behavior of poor and working-class girls alone could not explain these numbers. Commentators blamed the war for the growing racial and socioeconomic diversity of sexually active girls. A prominent sociologist called it a mistake “to suppose that … girls who are offering themselves to soldiers come only from homes of poverty and ignorance.”¹⁶ In an unusual newspaper piece showcasing the voices of young people, a girl who described herself as poor noted (with some satisfaction) that “not a girl in our school or … neighborhood has yet run away with a sailor like the girl we read about the other day. She came from one of the best families. Her mother wasn’t working in a war factory. Her home wasn’t broken.”¹⁷ Awareness was growing about white middle-class girls’ wartime escapades. The war seemed to flatten class-based differences, both facilitating and making more visible sexual adventure among young people from “respectable” families and communities.¹⁸ The rising influence of psychological explanations for sex delinquency further eroded the salience of socioeconomic differences among sexually active wartime girls.¹⁹

In addition to sex crime statistics and professional observations, two other kinds of sources support the claim that teen girls’ sexual activity surged during the war. The first are data about sexually transmitted diseases, which show that most of the time, servicemen were contracting infections on furlough in their home communities after having sex with teenagers as well as older women.²⁰ Second are data about illegitimate pregnancy and adoption. The Children’s Bureau recorded a 10 percent increase in admissions to homes for unmarried mothers during the war, and census data shows that the rate of single motherhood climbed by more than 40 percent in the first half of the 1940s.²¹ Historians of adoption see the war as a “watershed,” because the average age of birth mothers dropped precipitously; the share of children reportedly relinquished because of illegitimacy more than doubled; the proportion of unmarried birth mothers jumped from one-third to nearly two-thirds; and the alleged fathers were overwhelmingly servicemen.²² This data buoys the conclusion of Francis Merrill, the leading sociologist of the wartime home front, that “the effect of the war upon the sexual life of adolescent girls was disproportionately great.”²³ Girls did not wait until the 1940s to start running away and hooking up with boys and men, but as one federal official put it, this “problem … [was] very definitely spread and intensified by war conditions.”²⁴

One question that alarmed wartime Americans was just how young these victory girls really were. Skimming headlines of newspapers, one could easily conclude that thousands of girls as young as ten were jumping into bed with men in the armed services and war industries.²⁵ Federal officials fueled the fires of public panic by blaming twelve-to-sixteen-year-old girls for a significant part of the venereal disease problem, though they were apparently relying ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What Are We Waiting For?
• Chapter One: Victory Girls
• Chapter Two: B-Girls
• Chapter Three: Tearing Off the Veil
• Chapter Four: Going Steady
• Chapter Five: Someone to Love
• Conclusion: Feminist Sexual Futures
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index