UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Youthful Transgressions: Teenagers, Sexuality, and the Contested Path to Adulthood in Postwar America Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3vb042vb Author Stein, Julie Solow Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Youthful Transgressions: Teenagers, Sexuality, and the Contested Path to Adulthood in Postwar America By Julie Solow Stein A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Paula Fass, Chair Professor Richard Cándida Smith Professor Kristin Luker Fall 2013 © 2013 by Julie Solow Stein All rights reserved Abstract Youthful Transgressions: Teenagers, Sexuality, and the Contested Path to Adulthood in Postwar America by Julie Solow Stein Doctor of Philosophy in History and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Paula Fass, Chair “Youthful Transgressions” examines teenage sexual culture in the United States after World War II. It focuses in particular on the ways that changing notions of childhood and adulthood influenced the place of sexually precocious adolescents in American society. This dissertation argues that between the 1940s and the 1980s, teenage sexuality transformed from a private problem that was seen as leading children into premature adulthood, to a public problem that kept adolescents in a pathologized version of childhood. This dissertation addresses the question of how Americans decided who was an adult and who was a child, as well as the consequences of those decisions. In the immediate postwar years, sexually active teenagers were reclassified as adults and hidden from public view through hasty marriages and mandatory expulsions from schools. In the 1960s and 1970s, married and pregnant youth took advantage of a newly expansive concept of childhood to fight their way back into schools and reclaim many of the legal and social rights of children. By the late 1970s and 1980s, lawmakers became convinced that teenage childbearing was an epidemic and responded with federal programs that intervened into the personal and sexual lives of youth and redefined teenage mothers as dependent children. “Youthful Transgressions” draws from a range of institutional, legal, popular and personal sources, including school records, court documents, congressional testimony, newspaper and magazine articles, advice literature, popular music, and diaries. These sources reveal that ideas about age categories and sexuality evolved in tandem. Teenagers created their own definitions of childhood, adulthood, and age-appropriate sexuality that coexisted with adult views, challenged conventional norms, and evolved to meet their needs over the course of the twentieth century. 1 To my parents, Jenny and Martin i Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... iii Introduction .........................................................................................................................1 1 “I’m Going Steady With a Dream”: Steady Dating, Autonomy and Youth Culture .......................................................13 2 Early to Wed: Teenage Marriage in Postwar America ..................................................................39 3 Student Bodies: Adolescent Marriage and Parenthood in American High Schools ........................71 4 A School of One’s Own Teenage Pregnancy in the Classroom, Courtroom, and Congress .........................92 5 Pregnant in Public: Teenage Pregnancy and the State after 1975 .......................................................118 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................149 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................152 ii Acknowledgements I have been looking forward to writing these acknowledgments for years, not only because it would mean I had finally completed my dissertation, but because it would allow me to thank the community of generous, brilliant, and kind people who helped me along the way. First and foremost, I am grateful to Paula Fass, my advisor, mentor and strongest advocate since the first day of graduate school. Paula read every page and every draft of this project, offered incisive criticism and thoughtful advice, and taught me a great deal about the type of scholar, teacher, and mentor I hope to be. This dissertation began in a seminar with Richard Cándida Smith, and he has served as both a careful reader and a source of great intellectual support throughout this process. Little did I know when he recruited me to work at the Regional Oral History Project that it would lead to some of my favorite experiences during graduate school. There is nothing like listening to a ninety-year-old “Rosie” tell stories about welding deep in the belly of World War II Victory ships to remind a stressed-out graduate student of the importance and joy of doing history. Thank you to Kristin Luker for serving on my dissertation committee and for her brilliant work on teenage pregnancy, which inspired and guided me throughout this process. I was fortunate to work with many other wonderful professors at the University of California, Berkeley. Mark Peterson, who taught the first seminar I took at Berkeley, made me and my cohort-mates feel at home in graduate school and shared tips that helped us conquer seemingly impossible tasks (like reading multiple books in a week – or a day). I am grateful to David Henkin for our first conversations that convinced me to come to Berkeley, for keeping me sane during orals, and for helping me navigate my way through graduate school. Ruth Rosen nurtured my interest in women’s history with enthusiasm and helped me become a better teacher. I am grateful to Barrie Thorne for her intellectual curiosity and for introducing me to the wonders of sociology and feminist theory. Finally, thanks to Mabel Lee for keeping the history department running smoothly, for answering my endless questions with a smile on her face, and for making sure I got my History Department Alumni pin before I left. The Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality provided a second intellectual home on campus and introduced me to a community of like-minded scholars from every corner of the University. I owe a huge debt to the members of the Spring 2011 dissertation workshop led by Minoo Moallem. They helped me turn my trepidation into paragraphs, my scrawled notes into a chapter, and they generously engaged with my work at every messy stage of the writing process. I came to know a remarkable group of scholars as the graduate student representative on the Executive Committee of the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth. Caroline Cox, Ning de Coninck-Smith, Miriam Forman-Brunell, Mona Gleason, Patrizia Guarnieri, Colin Heywood, James Marten, Steven Mintz, Patrick Ryan, Bengt Sandin, Kelly Schrum, Rebecca de Schweinitz, and Luke Springman welcomed me into this vibrant field and showed me what true scholarly engagement looks like. I am particularly grateful to Michael Grossberg, whose insightful comments on my conference paper led me to think about my topic in new and exciting ways. I would also like to iii thank Karen Sanchez-Eppler and Laura Lovett, co-editors of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. They saw potential in a conference presentation and helped me wrangle it into an article. Two anonymous reviewers provided valuable feedback and introduced me to 1960s rock songs that made their way into the dissertation and provided the soundtrack for much of the writing process. This project was supported by the generous funding of UC Berkeley’s Department of History, the Graduate Division, the Center for Race and Gender, the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Throughout my research, I was impressed by the enthusiasm and knowledge of archivists I met along the way. Particular thanks to Sarah Hutcheon and the rest of the staff of the Schelsinger Library, Kimberly Springle at the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, and David Mint at the New York City Municipal Archives. For the past six years, my friends and classmates created a second family for me as I willed this project into being. Within the history department, particular thanks goes to Alice Goff, Chi Ha, Rebecca Herman, Rebecca Hodges, Gabe Milner, Jacqui Shine, and Jenny Thai for making the endless hours in the history library tolerable and the past six years (despite the odds) a whole lot of fun. I would not have gotten through the last big writing push were it not for Radhika Natarajan and our mini-writing group, Sarah Gold McBride, who stepped in as my pinch hitter and patron saint of last-minute paperwork without missing a beat, and Adrianne Francisco, who provided housing, friendship and an excuse to eat delicious Bay Area food. Friends outside of my field tolerated more than their fair share of stories about midcentury teenage courtship while also providing a much-needed world apart from it. Thank