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Seduction, Sexual Violence, and Marriage in New York City, 1886–1955

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Stephen Robertson
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On February 15, 1886, in a New York City courtroom, Bridget Grady placed her mark on an affidavit charging Bernard Reilly with rape. The twenty-six-year-old servant told the magistrate that in July of the previous year, while her employer was in the country, Reilly had called on her at the east 38th Street home where she worked. he had been Bridget's “steady company” for about three years and had “several times told her that if he married at all, he would marry her.” During the visit he made what Bridget described as unexpected, unprecedented “advances” to her. When she resisted, Reilly seized her, and they fell to the floor. Bridget, being, as she put it, a “proper and virtuous woman,” became so frightened at Reilly's conduct that she immediately lost consciousness. While Bridget was in that state, Reilly had sexual intercourse with her, as a result of which Bridget became pregnant. once she regained consciousness, Bridget “began to cry, and declared she would kill herself; he took her upon his lap and tried to pacify her, telling her at that time that if anything came of it he would marry her.” As a result of that promise, Bridget took no action against Reilly. Seven months later, however, still unmarried, and due to give birth to a child in two months, Bridget had come to the court to make a complaint.

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Law and History Review , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Summer 2006 , pp. 331 - 373
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Copyright © the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2006

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References

1. Court of General Sessions Case File (hereafter CGSCF), People v. B. D. (April 1886) (Municipal Archives, New York City)Google Scholar. I have changed the names of all the parties to the cases I discuss in this article. The names of the legal officials have not been changed.

2. Estrich, Susan, Real Rape: How the Legal System Victimizes Women Who Say No (Cambridge: Harvard University press, 1987)Google Scholar. estrich offers the best discussion of appellate court decisions on rape.

3. For discussion of appellate court decisions on that issue, see Ibid., 42, 53-54.

4. Laws of New York, 1886, chap. 663, 953.

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6. Feinsinger, Nathan, “Legislative Attack on ‘heart Balm,’” Michigan Law Review 33.7 (May 1935): 988, n. 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Those laws were still in place in 1951. The thirteen states without seduction laws were Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, New hampshire, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, and West Virginia. See Bensing, Robert, “A Comparative Study of American Sex Statutes,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 42 (1951): 66–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In 1967, Walter Wadlington found seduction laws in thirty-seven states, as well as the Canal Zone, Guam, puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. See Wadlington, Walter, “Shotgun Marriage by operation of Law,” Georgia Law Review 1 (1967): 193Google Scholar.

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10. Until the 1920s, neither women, nor their male partners, nor their families, used the language of love when they talked about relationships and marriage in New York City's courtrooms ( Robertson, , “Making Right,” 210Google Scholar). In other contexts, working women talked of marriage instead in terms of the escape it offered from the paid workforce. In Italian neighborhoods, the feelings of an individual woman mattered less than those of her parents, who still sought to arrange the marriage of their daughter and gave more attention to how well a prospective husband could provide for her than to his feelings for her. See D'emilio, and Freedman, , Intimate Matters, 184–86Google Scholar; Ware, Caroline, Greenwich Village, 1920-1930 (New York: Harper, 1935), 181-82, 184, 405Google Scholar; Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 95Google Scholar.

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15. See Robertson, Stephen, Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), chap. 9Google Scholar.

16. Their occupations provide a relatively clear indication of their class identity, one confirmed by the details of the cases. For example, of the fifty occupations reported by defendants in sexual violence cases in 1901, the most common were barber, laborer, and painter. The defendants in subsequent years came from similar groups. In 1936, an even greater proportion were laborers, with the other most common occupations being porter, chauffeur [taxi-driver], dishwasher, and painter. There were also clerks, janitors, bellboys, shoemakers, carpenters, salesmen, hairdressers, packers, laundrymen, and seamen. plaintiffs reported similar occupations. In 1901, the largest group of women worked in factories, mostly in the garment industry, with almost as many employed as domestic servants, and the remainder as shopgirls and salesgirls. By 1936 only a small number worked in factories; waitress was the most common occupation, followed by domestic service. In contrast to 1901, almost all those under eighteen years of age were in school.

17. In 1901, for example, after the one-third of defendants in sexual violence cases who were American born, the next largest groups were Italians, who constituted nearly one in every five defendants, Russians, and Germans (N=69). Twenty-three defendants were American- born; thirteen were born in Italy, nine in Russia, and eight in Germany. The remainder included several englishmen, a West Indian, a Canadian, a Norwegian, a Frenchman, and an Austrian.

18. That conclusion must be couched somewhat generally because the legal records do not allow a fine-grained analysis of different groups. The forms used by the DA's office recorded only birthplace, providing evidence of ethnicity only when most working-class New Yorkers were first generation immigrants, in the years before 1930. An individual's name obviously provides some guide to his or her ethnicity, but names are not sufficiently reliable evidence to support a close analysis of differences between ethnic groups. Moreover, there was no section on the forms that required clerks to record any information about an individual's race. As a result, African Americans can only be identified when their racial identity is mentioned in a file, or when a clerk or prosecutor added a scrawled note. only the probation Department files consistently provided information on race, but records for the period before the 1920s have not survived, and records for only some of the small group of men who were convicted are extant. More significant, however, is the fact that only in regard to a narrow range of issues do the details of the cases themselves offer any evidence of differences within the working class.

19. See Robertson, , Crimes against Children, chap. 1Google Scholar.

20. The only case that appeared to cross class boundaries and involve a middle-class man was prosecuted in 1936; see District Attorney's Closed Case Files (hereafter DACCF) 210716 (1936) (Municipal Archives, New York City). only four couples came from different ethnic groups: a Dutch/puerto Rican couple; a Spanish/english couple; a polish/Italian couple; and an Austrian/polish couple. All the remaining twenty-nine cases in which it was possible to establish, or to make an informed guess about, ethnicity involved couples from the same group-ten Russian Jewish couples, four Italian couples, three German couples, two hungarian couples, two French couples, two puerto Rican couples, one Austrian couple, one Dutch couple, one polish couple, one Romanian couple, one Finnish couple, and one Irish couple.

21. only two of those cases are part of the sample discussed in this article: DACCF 187612 (1931); and DACCF 210354 (1936), which ended with the marriage of the couple. Neither of the remaining two cases contained information on the plaintiff's age, precluding their inclusion in the sample. one, prosecuted in1941, in which the woman was pregnant, was dismissed by the grand jury after the couple married. See DACCF 230135 (1941). The second, prosecuted in 1955, was also dismissed by the grand jury; there is no indication of the grounds for that decision. See DACCF 192 (1955).

22. Robertson, , Crimes against Children, chap. 9Google Scholar.

23. Hill, Marilynn Wood, Their Sisters' Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830-1870 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 140–44Google Scholar; Berg, Barbara, The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism. The Woman and the City, 1800-1860 (New York: oxford University Press, 1978), 209–12Google Scholar.

24. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: oxford University press, 1985), 110Google Scholar.

25. First Annual Report of the Female Moral Reform Society of the City of New York, Presented, May 1835, excerpted at http://womhist.binghampton.edu/fmrs/doc1.htm (4 october 2002).

26. For moral reform, see Berg, , Remembered GateGoogle Scholar; Ryan, Mary, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 116–26Google Scholar; Smith-Rosenberg, , “;Beauty”Google Scholar; Hobson, Barbara, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 49–76Google Scholar; Haag, Pamela, Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 3–24Google Scholar; and Daniel Wright and Kathryn Kish Sklar, “What Was the Appeal of Moral Reform to Antebellum Northern Women?” http://womhist.binghamton.edu/fmrs/intro.htm (4 october 2002). For the campaign for the seduction law, see Hill, , Their Sisters' Keepers, 140–44Google Scholar; and Berg, , Remembered Gate, 209–12Google Scholar. For the abduction law-which the commissioners who drafted New York's penal Code had proposed to entitle “seduction for the purposes of prostitution”-see Laws of New York, 1848, chap. 105, 118; and Robertson, , Crimes Against Children, chap. 4Google Scholar. The Legislature took no action in reference to adultery, which reformers had also sought to have made a crime.

27. Laws of New York, 1848, chap. 111.

28. Laws of New York 1916, c. 196. In addition, in 1881, the authors of the new penal Code upgraded the offense from a misdemeanor to a felony. See penal Code of the State of New York, title X, sec., 284, in Laws of New York, 1881, vol. 3, chap. 676.

29. Godbeer, Richard, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 228Google Scholar; Hobson, , Uneasy Virtue, 31, 51Google Scholar.

30. Dayton, Cornelia, Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina press, 1995), 12-13, 208, 215, 227, 305-7, 327Google Scholar.

31. Godbeer, , Sexual Revolution, 255Google Scholar; Robertson, , “;Making Right,” 215Google Scholar.

32. Dayton, , Women Before the Bar, 188–207Google Scholar; Godbeer, , Sexual Revolution, 256–57Google Scholar.

33. Gordon, Linda and DuBois, Ellen, “Seeking ecstacy on the Battlefield: Danger and pleasure in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Sexual Thought,” Feminist Review 13 (1983): 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. For judicial interpretations of resistance, see Estrich, , Real Rape, 29–41Google Scholar. For discussion of the argument that it was impossible for a healthy adult woman to be raped, see Robertson, Stephen, “Signs, Marks, and private parts: Doctors, Legal Discourses, and evidence of Rape in the United States, 1823-1930,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8 (January 1998): 350–63Google ScholarPubMed.

35. Haag, , Consent, 3Google Scholar. See also VanderVelde, Lea, “The Legal Ways of Seduction,” Stanford Law Review 48 (April 1996): 862–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. Sinclair, M. B. W., “Seduction and the Myth of the Ideal Woman,” Law and Inequality 5 (1987): 35–47Google Scholar; VanderVelde, , “;Legal Ways,” 867–83Google Scholar.

37. The best account of the breach of promise tort in the American context is Grossberg, Michael, Governing the Hearth: Law and Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina press, 1985), 34–44Google Scholar.

38. Sinclair, , “;Seduction,” 46Google Scholar.

39. Nineteen states codified seductions actions, but five of those states did not allow the victim to sue on her own behalf. See Sinclair, , “;Seduction,” 61Google Scholar; and Larson, Jane, “;‘Women Understand So Little, They Call My Good Nature “Deceit”’: A Feminist Rethinking of Seduction,” Columbia Law Review 93 (1993): 385–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. Grossberg, , Governing the Hearth, 34–38Google Scholar.

41. Sinclair, , “;Seduction,” 52–53Google Scholar.

42. “The Importance of petitions,” Letter from N. h. of Westmoreland, New York, October 26, 1838Google Scholar, Advocate of Moral Reform, 15 November 1838, 174–75 http://womhistGoogle Scholar. Binghampton.edu/fmrs/doc19.htm (4 october 2002).

43. Berg, , Remembered Gate, 210Google Scholar. See also Haag, , Consent, 6Google Scholar; hill, , Their Sisters' Keepers, 142Google Scholar; hobson, , Uneasy Virtue, 67Google Scholar.

44. hobson, , Uneasy Virtue, 58, 68Google Scholar.

45. VanderVelde, , “;Legal Ways,” 846Google Scholar; Backhouse, Constance, Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto press, 1991), 80Google Scholar.

46. Wadlington found provisions for marriage as a defense in thirty-four of the forty-one state seduction laws. See Wadlington, , “;Shotgun,” 193Google Scholar.

47. People ex rel. Scharff v. Frost, 135 A.D 473, 120 N.Y.S. 491 (1909).

48. Haag, , Consent, 10Google Scholar.

49. In some other states, fornication, statutory rape, bastardy, or adultery laws recognized marriage as a defense. See Wadlington, , “;Shotgun,” 193–94Google Scholar.

50. Steinberg, Allen, The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina press, 1989)Google Scholar; Friedman, Lawrence, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993)Google Scholar; VanderVelde, , “;Legal Ways,” 853–55Google Scholar. There is no study of fornication and bastardy prosecutions in New York in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The only information on seduction prosecutions prior to 1881 is provided by hill, who notes that there were only eight prosecutions in New York City in the two years immediately after the enactment of the law ( Hill, , Their Sisters' Keepers, 143)Google Scholar.

51. For the new corroboration requirement, see Laws of New York, 1886, chap. 663, 953. For the change to the seduction statute, see penal Code of the State of New York, Title X, sec. 284, in Laws of New York, 1881, vol. 3, chap. 676; and New York State Legislature, Law Revision Commission, Communication and Study Relating to Sexual Crimes (Legislative Document 65(O), 1937) (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1937), 54Google Scholar.

52. Backhouse, , Petticoats and Prejudice, 61Google Scholar; Dubinsky, Karen, Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1993), 80Google Scholar.

53. See, for example, Haag, , Consent, 57Google Scholar.

54. N=51 of 56. Fourteen cases files provided no evidence of the plaintiff's age. See Appendix, Table 1. The cases discussed in this article were gathered as part of the research for Robertson, , Crimes against Children.Google Scholar

55. N= 44 of 179. In my sample years from the period 1886 to 1955 as a whole, 22 percent (N=71 of 316) of prosecutions saw men charged with a crime other than rape. Most of those prosecutions, 72 percent (N= 51 of 71), were for the crime of seduction. See Appendix, Figure 1. The New York County District Attorney's Case Files, and consequently my research, encompass only felonies. The crime of seduction was made a felony in 1881, by the authors of the state's penal Code; prior to that time, it was a misdemeanor. The only evidence surviving of misdemeanor prosecutions in New York City are the docket books of each court. I did not attempt an analysis of those records. For a more detailed breakdown of prosecutions of sexual violence in the period covered by this article, see Robertson, , Crimes against Children, appendixGoogle Scholar. That study includes only a very brief discussion of prosecutions for sex crimes against women over eighteen years of age; it is focused on the cases involving children that constituted the vast majority of the cases of sexual violence dealt with by the courts of New York County.

56. Hartog, , Man and Wife, 285Google Scholar.

57. DACCF 111200 (1916).

58. DACCF 113158 (1916).

59. DACCF 112932 (1916).

60. DACCF 112411 (1916). There is one additional seduction case in 1916, but the file does not contain details of when that defendant first proposed marriage.

61. Statement, March 1, 1932, 3, 5, in DACCF 189287 (1931).

62. Ibid.

63. People v. Duryea, 30 N. Y. S. 877 (1894)Google Scholar; People v. Van Alstyne, 144 N. Y. 361 (1894)Google Scholar. prior to People v. Van Alstyne some confusion had existed as to what constituted a conditional promise. The decisions cited to support the argument that the law applied to conditional promises dealt with cases in which the promise was that “the accused would marry the prosecutrix if she would consent to have connection with him.” See Kenyon v. People, 26 N.Y. 203, and Boyce v. People, 55 N. Y. 644. As the decision in People v. Duryea put it, in reasoning approved by the Court of Appeals in People v. Van Alstyne, “In the case of a promise conditional upon immediate intercourse, the condition is performed at the moment of the sexual act, and the promise to marry becomes absolute at once. Seduction in such a case is clearly accomplished under a promise to marry.”

64. People v. Van Alstyne, 29 N. Y. S. 543 (1894).

65. People v. Van Alstyne, 144 N. Y. 363 (1894).

66. People v. Van Alstyne, 29 N. Y. S. 544 (1894).

67. For another example of a case in which the nature of the promise is difficult to establish, see People v. Ryan, 71 N. Y. S. 527, 63 App. Div. 429 (1901)Google Scholar.

68. Robertson, , “Signs, Marks and private parts,” 350–63Google Scholar.

69. Women described being subject to physical force in 39 percent (N=31) of the files that contain details of the circumstances of the case, or 24 percent (N=51) of my total sample of seduction cases. The only other study of criminal seduction cases, Karen Dubinsky's work on ontario, found that 20 percent of the cases involved violence. however, the Canadian law applied only to promises of marriage made to females under twenty-one years of age, and also encompassed sexual intercourse with girls aged between fourteen and sixteen years, and sexual intercourse with a female ward or employee under twenty-one years of age. As a result, Dubinsky's figures do not provide the basis for a comparison. See Dubinksy, , Improper Advances, 66–79Google Scholar.

70. DACCF 109042 (1916).

71. DACCF 3715 (1946). For other examples, see DACCF 35385 (1901); DACCF 167338 (1926); DACCF 186006 (1931); DACCF 211275 (1936); DACCF 229384 (1941); DACCF 364 (1946); DACCF 1931 (1946); DACCF 1976 (1946); DACCF 3052 (1946).

72. For comments concerning a woman's lack of injuries, see DACCF 187321 (1931); DACCF 2550 (1946); DACCF 3489 (1946); DACCF 1719 (1946); DACCF 2270 (1946); DACCF 3333 (1946); DACCF 3489 (1946).

73. DACCF 207491 (1936); DACCF 207587 (1936); DACCF 228867 (1941); DACCF 3215 (1946); DACCF 3203 (1946). Courts throughout the United States took similar positions. See Estrich, , Real Rape, 29–36Google Scholar.

74. Estrich, , Real Rape, 27–56Google Scholar.

75. Laws of New York, 1881, vol. 3, chap. 676, 66-67.

76. Estrich, , Real Rape, 49–50.Google Scholar

77. DACCF 3333 (1946). Stereotypes about the sexual licentiousness of black women would almost certainly have contributed to this decision, but it is consistent with the decisions prosecutors and courts made in cases in my sample that involved white women. It is also consistent with the appellate court decisions described by estrich, who noted that the influential Model penal Code also “automatically downgrades the severity of the offense where there is a past relationship of intimacy ( Estrich, , Real Rape, 18, 23-25, 49–50 [Quotation on 50]).”Google Scholar

78. DACCF 86286 (1911). Since Susan was under eighteen years of age, this case was a prosecution for statutory rape. But given that it involved an allegation of force, and that neither the courts nor the New York Society for the prevention of Cruelty to Children, which oversaw prosecutions involving child victims, treated seventeen-year-old girls as children, it can serve as an example of what would have occurred in cases involving adult women. on the prosecution of statutory rape cases in the first half of the twentieth century, see Robertson, , Crimes against Children, chaps. 6 and 9Google Scholar.

79. Trial Transcript, in CGSCF, People v. J. F. (1911), 4Google Scholar.

80. For an elaboration of this argument, see Robertson, , “Making Right a Girl's Ruin,” 207–9Google Scholar. When DADA Donohue asked Olatka, Martha, “Why did you go out with this man when every time you went out with him you struggled in your cousin's hallway?”Google Scholar she answered, “Well, he always came to me.” “Why didn't you tell your cousin you didn't want to go out with him?” Donohue followed up. The only answer Martha could give was to reiterate, “Well, he came all the time I was there.” See DACCF 109042 (1916).

81. Trial Transcript, in CGSCF, People v. J. F. (1911), 36–61Google Scholar, quotation on 60. For other cases that involved attacks on a woman's character, see CGSCF, People v. G. M. (1891)Google Scholar, DACCF 84528 (1911); DACCF 112932 (1916); and DACCF 113158 (1916).

82. Not all the case files contain information on this topic, but none of those that do record the involvement of other parties.

83. Smith, Mary Roberts, “The Social Aspect of New York police Courts,” The American Journal of Sociology 5.2 (09, 1899): 145–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. on the conditions in Magistrates’ Courts, see also Fishman, Eric, “New York's Criminal Justice System, 1895-1932” (ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1980), 68–69Google Scholar. The police Courts were renamed Magistrates' Courts in 1910.

84. Joseph Morgenstern to J. perkins, January 3, 1907, in DACCF 57810 (1906).

85. DACCF 83969 (1911).

86. People v. Kingsley, 166 App. Div. 322 (1915)Google Scholar.

87. DACCF 109042 (1916). For cases involving witnesses, see CGSCF, People v. W. M. (April 1891)Google Scholar; DACCF 57464 (1906); DACCF 82813 (1911); DACCF 112932 (1916); DACCF 113158 (1916); DACCF 111200 (1916); DACCF 188658 (1931); DACCF 185206 (1931). For cases in which women produced rings and gifts, see DACCF 136956 (1921); DACCF 165496 (1926); DACCF 166849 (1926). For the case involving a man's attentions, see People v. Gumaer 30 N. Y. S. 17, 80 hun, 78 (1894)Google Scholar.

88. Trial Transcript, in CGSCF, People v. J.F. (1911), 58–59Google Scholar.

89. N=8 of 51.

90. See Appendix, Table 2.

91. Some of the prosecutions that failed did so for the same reasons that led to the dismissal of women's rape charges, namely complainants failing to appear, or a lack of corroborative evidence. See DACCF 84014 (1911); DACCF 57464 (1906); DACCF 166019 (1926); DACCF 209716 (1936). Fourteen of the twenty-seven cases that ended in dismissals for which details survive involved marriage, or a likely marriage. No details survive in twelve of the cases that were dismissed.

92. DACCF 35443 (1901); DACCF 139808 (1921); DACCF 136956 (1921); DACCF 165886 (1926); DACCF 165137 (1926); DACCF 188658 (1931). Two of the five seduction cases involving girls under the age of eighteen also ended in marriage, as did two of the twelve seduction cases where the woman's age was not recorded. The other two cases contained no information.

93. On judges' support of attempts to arrange a marriage in statutory rape cases, see Robertson, , “;Making Right,” 224–29Google Scholar.

94. People ex rel. Scharff v. Frost, 198 N.Y. 110, 91 N.e. 376 (1910)Google Scholar. In the earlier decision in this case, four judges in the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court had put a narrower construction on the statute, arguing “It seems to be reasonably clear that to [act as a bar to prosecution] the marriage must take place before the prosecution has been proceeded with to conviction.” Judge Clarke in dissenting from that opinion advanced the broader construction “that the prosecution referred to continues until final judgement ( People ex rel. Scharff v. Frost, 135 A.D 473, 120 N.Y.S. 491 [1909]).”Google Scholar

95. In regard to the civil action for breach of promise, Martha Coombs has claimed “a woman determined to bring a suit was no longer concerned primarily with the loss of opportunity to marry the defendant.” her claim, which is unsubstantiated, may apply better to women who turned to the civil law rather than the criminal law, but it appears to be an assumption. See Coombs, Mary, “Agency and partnership: A Study of Breach of promise plaintiffs,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 2 (1989): 10Google Scholar.

96. See Robertson, , “;Making Right,” 207–9Google Scholar.

97. Statement, 9, in DACCF 109042 (1916).

98. Addams argued that, “even the sordid marriages in which the senses have forestalled the heart almost always end in some form of family affection. The young couple who may have been brought together in marriage upon the most primitive plane, after twenty years of hard work in meager, unlovely surroundings, in spite of stupidity and many mistakes, in the face of failure and even wrong-doing, will have unfolded lives of unassuming affection and family devotion to a group of children.” See Addams, Jane, A New Conscience and an Old Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 203Google Scholar.

99. Trial Transcript Collection (hereafter TTC), Case 619, Roll 100 (1906), 10, 21, 39, 64, 90, 146-91, 240-42 (John Jay College of Criminal Justice). For a marriage under similar circumstances in a seduction case, see DACCF 83969 (1911). That case went to trial, but the jury could not reach a verdict. After the trial, the couple married, and the DA dismissed the charge of seduction.

100. Trial Transcript, in CGSCF, People v. J. F. (1911), 9, 17, 18, 22Google Scholar.

101. DACCF 57464 (1906). For other, less dramatic, examples of women expressing a sense that they were ruined, see DACCF 83969 (1911); DACCF 185206 (1931).

102. N=225 of 734. The proportion jumped significantly in the second half of the period. In 1896-1926, only 13 percent of the girls in statutory rape cases were pregnant (N=40 of 300); in 1931-1955 the proportion was 39 percent (N=185 of 474). See Robertson, Crimes against Children, appendix, table 5.

103. On bastardy proceedings in New York, see Robertson, , “;Making Right,” 219Google Scholar.

104. Berry, Mary Frances, The Pig Farmer's Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice (New York: Knopf, 1999), 131–32Google Scholar.

105. efforts to arrange a marriage took place in 36 percent of the cases (N= 22 of 61), compared to an average of 55 percent of the cases involving immigrant girls (although those figures are drawn from two separate periods-the figure for African-Americans refers to the years 1931-1955; the figure for immigrant girls to the years 1896-1926). See Robertson, , Crimes against Children, chap. 9Google Scholar.

106. Drake, St. Clare and Clayton, Horace, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), 592, 594Google Scholar. See also Smith, Enid, A Study of Twenty-Five Adolescent Unmarried Mothers in New York City (New York, 1935)Google Scholar; and the studies discussed in Franklin, Donna, Ensuring Inequality: The Structural Transformation of the African-American Family (New York: oxford University press, 1997), 132–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

107. Rothman, , Hands and HeartsGoogle Scholar; Lystra, , Searching the Heart.Google Scholar

108. See Schwartzberg, , “‘Lots of Them.’”Google Scholar

109. DACCF 109042 (1916).

110. See Appendix, Table 2.

111. Three more states passed legislation between 1936 and 1939, and a fourth, Florida, in 1945. See Sinclair, , “;Seduction,” 65-68, 82–86Google Scholar.

112. Larson, , “;‘Women Understand So Little,’” 395, n. 88Google Scholar.

113. John Creegan to Foreman, Grand Jury, 31 July 1936, in DACCF 210716 (1936).

114. Meyerowitz, Joanne, “Sexual Geography and Gender economy: The Furnished Room Districts of Chicago, 1890-1930,” Gender and History 2.3 (Autumn 1990): 285–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

115. Sinclair, , “;Seduction,” 92Google Scholar. It is worth noting that only two years later, in 1937, McNaboe would promote, and then chair, a joint committee of the state legislature charged with investigating sex crime, a committee that would play a prominent role in articulating an understanding of sexual violence focused on crimes against children. See Robertson, , Crimes against Children, chap. 7Google Scholar.

116. Sinclair, , “;Seduction”Google Scholar; Coombs, , “Agency and partnership.”Google Scholar

117. Robertson, , “;Making Right,” 210Google Scholar; Robertson, , Crimes against Children, chap. 9Google Scholar.

118. Lynd, Robert and Lynd, Helen, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (1929; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1956), 114, 241Google Scholar. Frazier noted that African American girls also read, and were influenced by, those magazines; see Frazier, E. Franklin, The Negro Family in the United States, Revised and Abridged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 264Google ScholarPubMed.

119. As early as the 1920s, social workers had begun complaining that marriages orchestrated by the courts only led to more social problems. See Towne, Arthur, “Young Girl Marriages in Criminal and Juvenile Courts,” Journal of Social Hygiene 8 (July 1922): 287–305Google Scholar; and Robertson, “;Making Right,” 218Google Scholar.

120. For an analysis of bastardy law and its reform in the nineteenth century, see Grossberg, , Governing the Hearth, 196–233Google Scholar. For the emergence of illegitimacy as a problem that concerned progressive reformers, and their decision to address that problem through a focus on paternity and maintenance, see Tifflin, Susan, In Whose Best Interest? Child Welfare Reform in the Progressive Era (Westport: Greenwood, 1982), 166–86Google Scholar. For the New York law, which was added to the Domestic Relations law, see Laws of New York, 1925, chap. 255, 508-14. For a discussion of paternity proceedings in the late 1940s and early 1950s, see Association of the Bar of the City of New York and Gellhorn, Walter, Children and Families in the Courts of New York City (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1954), 192–216Google Scholar; and Schatkin, Sidney, Disputed Paternity Proceedings, 3d ed. (New York: M. Bender, 1953), 357–89Google Scholar.

121. In 1951, for example, men admitted paternity in 837 of the 917 cases decided; see Association of the Bar of the City of New York and Gellhorn, , Children and Families, 198Google Scholar.

122. Sinclair, , “;Seduction,” 91Google Scholar; Robertson, , “;Making Right,” 228–29Google Scholar; Robertson, , Crimes against Children, chap. 9. About 50 percent of working-class youth attended high school in 1930Google Scholar; by 1960, the proportion had risen to over 90 percent. Beginning in the early 1940s, the percentage of black students finishing high school jumped dramatically, and by the early 1960s, almost as many blacks were completing high school as whites. See Gilbert, James, Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: oxford University press, 1986), 18–19Google Scholar.

123. N=10 of 115.

124. N=59 of 200. Seduction cases made up 81 percent of those cases (N= 48 of 59).