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{Replace with the Title of Your Dissertation} Deviants and Dissidents: Children’s Sexuality and the Limits of Liberation A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY N’Jai-An Elizabeth Patters IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Regina Kunzel and Kevin P. Murphy, Advisors August 2010 © N’Jai-An Elizabeth Patters 2010 i Acknowledgements Writing this dissertation would not have been possible without the collective help of several individuals and institutions. It is my pleasure to thank them here. At Washington University, Andrea Friedman and Leslie Brown introduced me to history, and both offered me opportunities to think in new ways. Jim McLeod opened my eyes to the possibilities of scholarly engagement and persuaded me to consider graduate education. At Minnesota, I was blessed with a committee of advisors. Barbara Welke’s willingness to give even my most bizarre ideas the benefit of the doubt was a welcome introduction to academic advising. I continue to be inspired by her commitment and openness as a scholar. My interest in the postwar period was fostered by participating in a year-long seminar with Elaine Tyler May. She is a wonderful teacher, and I was fortunate to have her expertise and passion on my committee. Jennifer Gunn’s knowledge and generosity were true gifts, as was her willingness to read and discuss early drafts. Finally, my advisors Kevin Murphy and Regina Kunzel have been unwavering in their support of this project. They have read and re-read drafts, pushed me to develop my ideas, countered my resistance with a steady commitment to excellence, and supported my decision to pursue a different path. I am particularly fortunate to have stumbled across the flyer advertising Minnesota’s writing services for graduate students that led to my relationship with Kirsten Jamsen. Kirsten and the entire staff of the Center for Writing have been a consistent source of encouragement and support. Her interest in my work and her belief in my ability to finish have been the greatest remedy for writer’s block and a host of other insecurities that plagued me as a dissertator. She has been a wonderful model and sounding board for different ways to be an academic. I would also like to thank Marnette Doyle for her tireless attention, her assistance in helping me figure out what I wanted from this dissertation, and her ability to help me identify what’s really important. One of the greatest pleasures of graduate school has been joining a community of fellow travelers. Miles Grier, my blackest friend, has inspired me with his commitment to and pursuit of scholarly excellence. He has been and remains one of my favorite people with whom to discuss ideas. Priti Mishra offered her friendship from our first days at Minnesota and our discussions about research, writing, and other scholarly pursuits have helped me immeasurably. Sarah Crabtree deserves special thanks for being such a wonderful friend. She has generously shared her many intellectual, political, pedagogical, and culinary gifts with me. Many thanks for the personal and professional support of a wonderful group of friends and colleagues, including: Nikki Berg, Karen Carmody-McIntosh, Chantal Norrgard, Richard Parks, Kira Robison, Emily Rook-Koepsel, Jason Stahl, and Jamie Stephenson. Early drafts of this project were shaped by the thoughtful feedback that I received from members of the Comparative Women’s History Workshop, the Radical History Workshop, and participants in Elaine and Lary May’s dissertation group. I thank them for their attention to my work. I have been fortunate to receive funding at critical points while researching and writing this dissertation. Grants from the History Department and the Graduate School ii helped me complete the research necessary for the project. Portions of chapter four have been published in a different form in The 1980s: Critical or Transitional Decade. Thanks to editors, Duncan Campbell and Kimberly Moffitt, for their guidance through the revision process. I can’t say enough about the innumerable ways that Kelly Place has helped me. She has been a refuge, a comfort, a companion, and a good eater. She unselfishly shares the joys of pet-ownership with me, and the antics of Frances and Meghan have provided a welcome dose of comic relief to my life. Because of her I have been welcomed into a warm and loving family. I am thankful for the care and kindness that I have received from Patty, Charlie, Kasey, and Megan. Finally, I would like to offer my thanks to Seth and Pearlena Patters. My parents’ pride in me has been a constant source of inspiration. My father was my champion and biggest cheerleader. I could always count on his prayers, wisdom, and boisterousness to help me through the difficulties of this project. I miss him terribly, but I know that he would have been thrilled to see me finish. My mother’s constant interest in the details of the project was a welcome surprise. She embraced and encouraged my passion for history, and she read far more than her share of chapters and proposals. I am grateful to have had this “learned non-specialist” in my corner. I thank my parents for their unfailing support and dedicate this project to them with love. iii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to Seth and Pearlena Patters with love. iv Abstract My dissertation takes the child as its focus to understand both liberation politics and social conservative movements in the postwar United States. I reveal that, even as leftist social movements viewed children as possessing “sexuality” and argued for the liberation of children’s sexual expression, they simultaneously invoked the child as a vulnerable figure who must be protected from sexual abuse and violence in a dangerous postwar culture. Ultimately, the protectionist rhetoric about children’s sexuality proved more powerful and influential than the libratory rhetoric, in large part because it shared features with the burgeoning rhetoric of the religious right, who found political power in a broad call to “save the children.” My analysis of these competing rhetorical frameworks reveals the ways in which the child came to structure late-20th-century political discourse by marking the limits of liberation. Using children’s sexuality as a point of entry into postwar political activism, my dissertation sheds light on the evolution of political identities. Ultimately, my work highlights the shrinking of progressive political possibilities and the emergence of a consolidated conservative political discourse. This dissertation argues that 1970s social movement groups’ attention to and use of the figure of the child, particularly children’s sexuality, was central to their efforts to advance libratory frameworks. I trace the ways that three Boston groups—the Boston Women’s Health Collective, the Elizabeth Stone House, and the North American Man/Boy Love Association—organized around issues of children’s sexuality. Each adopted seemingly altruistic child-focused agendas that were used to benefit the groups’ adult members. In advancing these agendas, group members participated in the creation of a symbolic child-victim whose invocation would become a means of foreclosing political debate and establishing a cultural consensus of protection in the 1980s. In the end, the figure of the child that was so central to libratory movements of the 1970s was the very thing that limited their vocabularies and contained their agendas by the 1980s. Rather than focusing on a single movement, this project demonstrates that the child repeatedly emerged as a political tool in leftist activism and argues that this figure shaped the boundaries of liberation and the content of radicalism. v Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………...………1 1. ‘The Century of the Child’: Expert Literature and the Modern Child ……………..25 2. Women and Children First: Second-Wave Maternalism and the Politics of Health…………………………………………………………………………………..60 3. Save the Children: The North American Man/Boy Love Association and the Politics of Rights………………………………………………………………………………..94 4. The Rise of the Child-Victim: Children’s Vulnerability and the Changing Politics of Victims and Saviors…………………………………………………………………...121 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….167 References…………………………………………………………………………….173 1 Deviants and Dissidents: Children’s Sexuality and the Limits of Liberation On the opening page of her controversial text, Judith Levine described a mounting panic about children’s sexuality announcing, “In America today, it is nearly impossible to publish a book that says children and teenagers can have sexual pleasure and be safe too.”1 The heated debate in which Levine found herself after the publication of Harmful to Minors supported her assertion.2 This dissertation attempts to address how children’s safety came to be defined in terms of their removal from sexual subjectivity. This dissertation argues that 1970s social movement groups’ attention to and use of the figure of the child, particularly children’s sexuality, was central to their efforts to advance libratory frameworks. I trace the ways that three Boston groups—the Boston Women’s Health Collective, the Elizabeth Stone House, and the North American Man/Boy Love Association—organized around issues of children’s sexuality. These seemingly altruistic child-focused agendas were used to benefit the adult members of each of these groups. In advancing these agendas, they participated in the creation of a symbolic child-victim whose invocation would become a means of foreclosing political debate and establishing a cultural consensus of protection in the 1980s. In the end, the figure of the child that was so central to libratory movements of the 1970s was the very thing that limited their vocabularies and contained their agendas by the 1980s. 1 Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002), xix. 2 After facing difficulties securing a publisher for her book, Levine got a contract with the University of Minnesota Press.
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