Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [271]
The court brushed aside her objections. For one thing, only women could commit the crime of prostitution (apparently, California high court judges in 1922 could not conceive of a male prostitute at all). In any event, “fallen women” represented “a greater single element of economic, social, moral, and hygienic loss than is the case with any other single criminal class.” From the standpoint of public health, they were “pestilential, ... a common pathological danger.” The state, “realizing” that the fallen woman cannot escape from her “life of shame,” had “undertaken to take forcible charge of this class of unfortunates and extend to them a home, education, assistance, and encouragement.” In so doing, the state combined “both altruism and self-preservation.”30
The rise of a strong feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s focused attention on prostitution once more. In 1971, the National Organization for Women (NOW), after condemning the social conditions that permitted the exploitation of women, came out foursquare for the decriminalization of prostitution.31 By this time, “working women” had even formed an organization, a kind of prostitutes’ union. But society was apparently not ready for decriminalization. No other state seemed eager to follow the example of Nevada, which made prostitution legal by “local option,” that is, county by county.ed Elsewhere, prostitution remained illegal, though the laws were only gingerly enforced. This is one area where the Victorian compromise has apparently never died.
Sexual Justice
It is no surprise to find that the double standard, so deeply embedded in men’s minds, found its way into criminal codes. The chastity of wives and daughters was very precious to the law. The Texas law that allowed a man to kill his wife’s lover if he caught the pair in the act survived until only just yesterday (1973).33 In a number of states, there were variations on this general theme. In Delaware, for example, manslaughter was a felony, but it dropped to a misdemeanor if “committed by a husband on a person found in the act of adultery with his wife.”34 Needless to say, a woman who caught her husband in the act was given no such license to kill. As we have seen, the double standard operated in delinquency law as well; girls were declared delinquent for sexual behavior that would not raise an eyebrow if committed by boys. What was “wild oats” for him was delinquency for her.
Paul W. Tappan, writing in the 1940s about New York’s Wayward Minor Court, was one of the few who spoke out against the double standard. By what right, he asked, does a court impose penalties “for the nonprostitutional (and frequently nonpromiscuous) sex behavior of girls from sixteen to twenty-one”? What authorized it to punish “filial insubordination”? Tappan’s case material was full of horror stories. An eighteen-year-old, the daughter of Greek parents, fell in love with a “dark-skinned Puerto Rican.” The parents tried to get the Wayward Minor Court to commit her to Bellevue Hospital; they insisted she was “backward” and demanded that she be “put away.” She escaped the grips of the court (and her family) only by marrying a different man.35
Mary Odem researched the cases of delinquent girls in the custody of the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court in 1920—220 cases in all. Most were working-class girls. They were charged primarily (90 percent) with status offenses: running away, violation of curfew, incorrigibility, and, above all (81 percent) with sex or morals offenses. In one case, a school principal turned a girl over to the authorities because she wore “tight skirts, high-heeled shoes, and silk stockings.” A vice-principal turned in a twelve-year-old girl because she was “idle and in conversation with boys on Main St. and various places and finally I thought for the good of the other girls something must be done.” These were perhaps extreme cases; mostly, girls got in trouble for sex, plain and simple—a typical case was Rose Lafitte, who worked