Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties

By Tamara Ashley

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jul 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781469623795

Tamara Ashley

Dr Tamara Ashley leads the MA Dance Performance and Choreography programme at the University of Bedfordshire. She has published Mapping Lineage Artist Book (2018), lineage maps of practice by dance improvisation artists, ‘Scores for Eco-Sensitive Dancing’ in The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation (2017) and edited a special issue of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices on Interactivity and Embodiment, 8(1) 2016.

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Introduction: What Are We Waiting For?

In the year the United States finally declared war on Germany and Japan (1941), a seventeen-year-old girl named Annie told a Texas social worker why she had once again run away from her Ohio home. Having worked at taverns, hitchhiked with truck drivers, traveled with a carnival, acquired two soldier boyfriends, and enjoyed sexual relationships with other men, she told her interviewer 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

A young woman named Theresa became sexually involved with a married man while her own husband was serving overseas, according to a work of pulp nonfiction. At the urging of the man’s wife, police charged Theresa with parental neglect. When she was convicted, Theresa reportedly contended that her life was hers to do with as she pleased and demanded to know by what right the state attempted to regulate the private life of its citizens.²

Having made the transition from wartime to postwar San Francisco, a drink solicitor named Maria used sexual promises to encourage a male companion to keep the liquor flowing. Witnesses testified to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control that Maria took her patron to a back booth in the bar, where she showed him her breasts and assured him, if you think this looks good, the rest looks better. Then she signaled the bartender for another round.³

One year after the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, a teen girl identified as Betty asked a poignant question in a popular magazine. Referring to Kinsey’s female subjects, one-third of whom reported having had premarital intercourse, Betty reasoned, If all those hundreds of women went ahead and got a lot of experience with boys, at our age, and they chose better husbands and even had better marriages because of it—what are we waiting for?⁴

Peggy Fox, a Catholic girl from outside of Chicago, chose not to wait. Decades later, she told an oral history interviewer that she did it and "lovedit with a boy named Pat when she was seventeen. In her early twenties, she continued dating nice Catholic boys who wanted to get married, but she was having too much fun spending evenings on a cot in the stockroom at work with a series of fast-and-loose guys. She rushed back and forth from church to confess, but in my heart I couldn’t believe that something that felt this good could be a sin."⁵

An unnamed eighteen-year-old sitting in a New York City venereal disease clinic in the late 1950s told an American Social Health Association researcher that she had derived satisfaction from her sexual relations with other girls over the previous year. In fact, she boldly declared, I prefer women to men. She looked forward to life after high school graduation, which she hoped would include business school, independence, a home, and someone to love.⁶

Although these women and girls lived one generation too early to challenge conservative sexual morality in organized ways, sexual desire was a driving force in their lives. Today, seeing the 1940s and 1950s as a time of sex anarchy seems strange, but worried observers at the time used this term—as well as sex revolution, an addiction to promiscuity, and a morals revolt—to describe changes in sexual culture. In this project, I ask why mid-century observers perceived widespread sexual normlessness well before the countercultural, women’s, and gay liberation movements championed sexual freedom, and why they insisted that it was women and girls—rather than men and boys—who were transforming postwar society. In a culture already transfixed by sexuality and uneasy about gender, how exactly did women and girls’ sexual practices and attitudes become a matter of national importance? How did experts make sense of what they observed, and what did girls and women themselves have to say about their sexual lives?

BEGINNING IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, structural changes in American society—especially urbanization—presented opportunities for many young women to pursue sexual relationships outside of heterosexual marriage. In the early twentieth century, immigrant and working-class young women explored the amusements and commercial opportunities of city life, often on the arms of young men who paid their way in exchange for sex. Younger girls sometimes joined in the modern fun despite scrutiny from new juvenile courts.⁷ The rise of dating practices eroded parental and community control, and prostitution lost ground to taxi dancing, stripping, and erotic dancing.⁸ The legalization of contraception and birth control activism accelerated the separation of heterosexual sex from reproduction. Sexual violence—especially racial and familial—continued to cause untold suffering, and consensual sex outside of marriage earned women nearly universal contempt; nonetheless, married women in the early 1900s explored sexual companionship while unmarried girls and young women found new avenues to express feelings of passion and desire.⁹

The rise of urban life and commercial amusements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed to a new spectrum of women’s [hetero]sexual activities, including treating as well as dramatically higher rates of premarital sex; these practices, in turn, facilitated the decline of prostitution.¹⁰ Major cities hosted thriving sexual subcultures for men who had sex with men and also for heterosexual couples seeking cross-racial encounters, sexual spectatorship, and performances of queer sexuality. Lesbian communities also formed within educational and reform circles.¹¹ Intellectual developments—such as the popularization of Freud’s critique of sexual repression and trans-Atlantic advocacy for freedom of sexual speech—encouraged sexual expression.¹²

In all of these ways, sexual culture in the decades before World War II was already shifting and changing, opening up certain possibilities for sexual independence, even for women and girls. The long sexual revolution was under way. My goal is not to claim that the 1940s and 1950s gave birth to the sexual revolution, but rather that women’s and girls’ sexual assertion on the wartime home front and their implicit revolt against gendered sexual hypocrisies in the postwar years inspired distinctive transformations in American sexual culture that galvanized ongoing social change.¹³

World War II, I argue, was more than a fleeting intensification of permissive trends. By engaging in premarital and extramarital sex during the war, Annie and Theresa showed how home front mobilization upset social conventions and opened new avenues for sexual adventure. Participants and historians have given many reasons for the widely recognized relaxation in the traditional moral code during wartime. Fearing death and seeking companionship, soldiers rushed girlfriends to the altar before shipping out; short periods of leave replaced drawn-out courtships; popular culture eroticized the man in uniform. War work generated economic independence and social opportunity as it lessened parental supervision over teens. Young women who left their home communities could rationalize their travels and adventures as contributions to the war effort, and thousands of married teen girls followed their new husbands to training facilities across the country only to find themselves desperate for money and company after the men went overseas. Young women and men in the military encountered new places, people, and possibilities for sexual self-discovery, including homosexuality. A wide range of teenage girls and adult women rushed to meet the sexual needs of GIs on furlough, blurring lines between commercial and casual sex. With the exception of brothel prostitution, the sexual activity of women and girls seems not to have been thwarted by widespread policing and criminalization.¹⁴

This picture of the wartime home front reveals remarkable sexual self-assertion, not only by servicemen but also by civilian women and teen girls. Though historians have emphasized the temporary nature of such behavior, I see wartime sexual experimentation as both magnifying the more limited independence that many young women had claimed during the 1920s and as anticipating young women’s explicit demands for sexual autonomy in the late 1960s and 1970s. Mid-century commentators were right to blame rising rates of premarital sex, in particular, on the sexual license unleashed by the war.¹⁵ In other words, the legacy of wartime sexuality was not lost in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Not unlike married women who, forced from the industrial labor force, continued to work in lower-status pink-collar jobs, female youth attacked by charges of delinquency and disorder found less overt ways to pursue sexual relationships. And soon enough, many victory girls became mothers of the baby boom and parented their own daughters with memories of wartime exhilaration in mind. However inadvertently, they communicated their frustrations with the gendered and sexual boundaries of postwar society to those daughters, some of whom became women’s and sexual liberationists of the next generation.¹⁶ Ultimately, the conservative postwar backlash could not contain female sexuality within marriage; while it helped to channel the force of wartime sexual self-determination toward a more relationship-oriented sexual ethic, as I argue in chapter 4, this development had its own liberalizing effects.

In the 1950s, Maria, Betty, Peggy, and the anonymous eighteen-year-old confronted powerful conservative forces. To succeed as a drink solicitor, Maria risked angering customers with a strong sense of male sexual entitlement. As white teens exhibiting an interest in premarital sex, Betty and Peggy faced potential stigma and shame, especially if they became pregnant. The eighteen-year-old African American girl who described not only her recent enjoyment of same-sex relationships but also a history of premarital heterosexual sex and sexual violence, hazarded the disapproval of her interviewer, who held a position of race, class, age, sexual, and professional privilege over her young research subject.

As these stories suggest, there is no shortage of evidence about postwar gender and sexual conservatism. Sexually experimenting youth were labeled delinquents and even became the subjects of congressional hearings.¹⁷ Popular experts pathologized girls, women, and gay men and women who had sex outside of heterosexual marriage; government and military officials persecuted gay men and lesbians; police enthusiastically targeted abortionists; citizens’ groups and public authorities mobilized obscenity laws against erotic literature; segregationists cast the sexual behavior of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans as threats to democracy, and they violently policed interracial relationships. Conservatives aggressively endorsed gender differentiation, sexual self-restraint, and the primacy of the straight, white, male-headed, middle-class nuclear family in postwar society.¹⁸

These forms of gender and sexual restriction were so pronounced, however, precisely because they were contested and embattled. In an important new essay, Joanne Meyerowitz proposes that we view the postwar era as one of competing ideals, multiple voices, and vocal debate in which sexual conservatives argued with and actively resisted the interests and proponents of sexual liberalism. Indeed, there were loud voices endorsing sexual expression, which liberals associated with health, fun, nature, beauty, freedom, democracy, and individual rights.¹⁹ The cultural, legal, and commercial dimensions of sexual liberalism provide an important context for the social practices that are at the heart of this project.

On the cultural level, Americans renounced years of sacrifice after the war ended and yielded to the influence of popular culture and consumerism.²⁰ In the postwar publishing world, sex sold extremely well. Playboy debuted in 1953 and quickly inspired dozens of nudie spinoff magazines marketed not only to heterosexual white men, but also to straight African American men and to gay men. Tabloids, scandal magazines, mail-order pamphlets, and cheap paperback novels showcased fringe sexual practices including homosexuality, adultery, oral sex, group sex, and voyeurism. Literature also featured erotic themes. Although most of the more explicit books were written by, for, and about men, a small group of commercially successful novels (and film adaptations) by women, such as Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, told stories of female sexuality outside of marriage. Lesbian and gay pulp fiction represented queer sexual relationships for straight and gay readers; some of the most successful, like Anne Bannon’s Beebo Brinker series, were written by women with a lesbian audience in mind. Even semirespectable subcultural magazines such as Jet, as Leisa Meyer argues, offered possibilities for "avowingsame-sex sexual attraction and other ‘deviant’ sexual subjectivities and for surprisingly fluid understandings of African American female sexual subjectivity."²¹

Moving from bookstores to dance halls, parties, and their own living rooms, postwar youth embraced a diverse and highly sexualized music culture. Jazz, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll artists drew from African American vernacular culture, sending suggestive lyrics and sensual rhythms over the airwaves and into the households of white middle-class Americans. Little Richard and Elvis Presley are the best-known purveyors of explicitly sexual lyrics and dance moves, but it would be a mistake to overlook bands like The Shirelles, made up of four black teen girls whose song about whether or not to have sex, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, hit the number one spot on the charts in 1960.²² Other young white and black female artists were less well-known but equally insistent in their musical expressions of sexual longing and appetite. Rock ‘n’ roll was especially threatening to dominant sexual values because of how explicitly it raised the specter of interracial social interaction and passion.²³ Critics decried the erotic enthusiasm of performers and their young fans and inspired some self-regulation within the entertainment industry, but as Meyerowitz explains, they could not stop the heavy investment in sex in the growing youth consumer culture.²⁴

Courtrooms also hosted debates about the extent of postwar Americans’ rights to sexual privacy, speech, and inclusion. The liberal argument that sexual expression was an individual right succeeded in overturning laws against interracial marriage in eight western states and convinced federal courts to chip away at obscenity laws throughout the 1950s. Sexual censorship took another hit when Hollywood leaders revised the production code in 1956, allowing filmmakers to portray abortion, interracial relationships, and prostitution.²⁵

The liberalization of sexual values accelerated in the postwar era in part because of the enormous faith placed in the possibilities of science and scientific expertise. Though certain authorities mobilized science in the service of (embattled) sexual traditionalism—as Carolyn Herbst Lewis has shown about physicians who tied normative gender identity to appropriate heterosexual sexual performance—scientific discourses more often justified a departure from conservative sexual morality. Practitioners and researchers in sexology, psychology, sociology, social work, marriage and family counseling, and other related fields shared their more liberal ideas in mainstream magazines, newspapers, and paperback books. Susan Freeman has shown that sex educators saw themselves as modern and scientifically oriented discussion facilitators; only rarely did they adopt religious or moral terminology, and most teachers acknowledged variability in accepted standards of femininity and chastity. As Alan Petigny explains, various individuals who invoked the authority of science when addressing social questions were better able to challenge the traditional moral framework. Alfred Kinsey was the most influential of these authorities, and chapter 3 investigates responses of women and girls to his work. Other chapters also incorporate the sort of professional commentary that gave Americans seeking sexual information and guidance alternatives to the traditional resources of family members and religious authorities.²⁶

Finally, the conservative postwar political culture gave rise to social movements contesting the boundaries of inclusion, democracy, and self-expression. Leaders in the gay and lesbian homophile movement associated gay life with democracy, freedom, and health, though men articulated this association more often than women. And elements of the burgeoning African American civil rights movement drew attention to interracial love and defended the social acceptability of interracial relationships. Both groups regarded love (and even marriage) as matters of individual liberty.²⁷

Within the scholarship that deals with the liberal side of the 1950s, only a few of the most recent books (such as those by Lewis and Freeman) offer a clear view of women and girls. Positions of influence in the mid-twentieth century were preserved almost exclusively for men, leaving women comparatively few opportunities to shape the policies, decisions, publications, and cultural productions in which battles over sex were waged. By looking at average people rather than major players, we can more effectively bring the experiences of women and girls into view.²⁸

It is critical to focus more closely on women and girls not simply as a matter of inclusion but because of the highly gendered nature of mid-century sexual values. By the 1940s, efforts to impose strict standards of sexual purity on men and women equally had failed, and the sexual double standard had replaced expectations of universal sexual self-restraint even in the middle class. The power of the double standard in the mid-twentieth century meant that advocates of sexual liberalism faced a steeper uphill battle with regard to female sexuality than male. Few even engaged the fight. In nearly every area of culture, politics, law, and expert discourse, it was men’s right to sexual self-determination and self-expression that was on the table. Women were usually present in these debates only as topics, objects, and symbols of men’s (hetero)sexual desire and freedom. The main exception to this generalization was the ubiquitous mid-century debate about premarital sex that raised compelling questions about delinquency, race, illegitimacy, teen pregnancy, courtship, marriage, and motherhood. More women in the ranks of social workers, sociologists, and marriage counselors debated the incidence and meanings of premarital sex than in the expert population more broadly, and most of the participants in these discussions—male and female alike—interacted regularly with young women as well as young men. On this topic, then, it is possible to hear a somewhat wider range of female voices.

The issue of premarital sex was extremely important to postwar sexual culture, because punitive beliefs about it constituted what was arguably the greatest obstacle to sexual liberalism: confining reproductive female sexuality to marriage was central to the traditional patriarchal sexual value system. In the decades before chemical contraception and legal abortion, the social costs of widespread premarital pregnancy were very high. And the legacy of Western Enlightenment patriarchy meant that men continued to be associated with individuality, while public discourse and policy persistently connected women to the family. As Kinsey documented and publicized in 1953, American women born after 1900 already had been having premarital intercourse at unprecedented rates, and mid-century communities were well aware that girls and women in their midst did in practice violate the abstract standard of premarital chastity. But calling for the acceptance of nonmarital sex among women and girls was a very different matter than supporting democracy, freedom, health, and individual rights for men. Understanding the long sexual revolution means that we have to grapple with struggles over the sexual autonomy of women and girls.

Evidence about gendered shifts in sexual culture has emerged from across the nation, but not evenly. Of the girls and women whose stories appear above, we have geographic location information for Annie (Texas and Ohio), Maria (San Francisco), Peggy (Chicago), and our anonymous eighteen-year-old (New York). In this study, place provides a context for behavior rather than a topic of independent analysis, and yet certain spatial patterns in the evidence warrant a few introductory remarks. My discussion of wartime sexual conduct and its regulation draws heavily from studies conducted in those cities that were most dramatically transformed by the mobilization of the defense industry. Military mobilization affected dozens of rural areas and small towns in the vicinity of encampment areas and training grounds, and so places like Leesville, Louisiana, and Silver Springs, West Virginia, do appear in government documents about social and sexual life during the war. Certain major cities experienced such rapid economic and dramatic demographic growth, however, that policy-makers invested a disproportionate amount of research resources there, meaning that places like Chicago, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., appear repeatedly in my discussion of wartime social change. But it was on the West Coast that the extraordinary forces of human migration, industrial mobilization, and military personnel concentration converged, attracting the most intense government scrutiny and leadership.

There are therefore two reasons why I focus most closely on behaviors taking place on the West Coast. First, changes in social life brought on by wartime mobilization were more pronounced in places where mobility and economic opportunity abounded. Second, federal officials concerned about military readiness prioritized research in those cities where the highest numbers of servicemen and civilian women were likely to encounter one another sexually. Conditions in places like San Francisco—where hundreds of thousands of servicemen, defense workers, and other migrants came together and shared in a thriving commercial subculture—encouraged both sexual adventure and the professional gaze that exposed it. On a somewhat smaller scale, other cities and military towns shared San Francisco’s wartime conditions, such as housing shortages, population influx, industrial employment, service sector growth, rationing, and changing patterns of commercial and casual sex.²⁹

When we broaden our view to encompass the transition to the postwar period, however, the significance of the war becomes more variable. Historians have shown that in certain areas, including the West, wartime expansion and transformation continued apace, but in other places, the wartime boom was a temporary blip in a trajectory of decline.³⁰ My analysis of postwar sexual culture draws on events and research from San Francisco and New York, two cities with distinctive diversities of peoples, politics, and sexual subcultures. To supplement these sources, I analyze nationally distributed publications and letters from individuals living across the country, but I am not in a position to make firm claims about regional and local variations in mid-century sexual culture. I hope that further research will enable even more precise understandings of how the long sexual revolution transpired across the many landscapes of postwar America.

A second spatial dimension of the project addresses the places in which girls and women sought out and encountered their soon-to-be sexual partners, as well as the locations where couples engaged in intimate sexual acts. In the 1940s and 1950s, researchers’ interest in reducing venereal disease (VD) transmission (first to servicemen and then within adolescent populations) motivated them to ask where people were having what they called sexual relations. The anti-VD agenda meant that they were predominantly interested specifically in intercourse, so there is much less data about the nature and location of other sexual practices. To a greater extent than historians have recognized, young Americans were engaging in sex acts in many different places, especially during the war, when gasoline rationing limited couples’ access to cars. Postwar couples enjoyed more options; bars and taverns, in particular, continued to host sexual encounters as drink solicitors and casual dates mixed drinking with sex commerce and sexual play. Bars and cars were only two of many semipublic spaces where mid-century Americans connected and experimented sexually with one another, suggesting that sexual life in this era was perhaps less private than we might assume.

Understanding female sexual assertion is not easy, in part because mid-twentieth-century women and girls only rarely spoke openly about their sexual lives. Hypocrisy was a defining feature of postwar sexual culture, so published discussions of nonconforming female sexuality usually reflected what people thought they should say rather than what they—or their acquaintances—actually did or believed. Commentators readily acknowledged this gap between standards and practice, but hardly any women before the 1960s would risk their own reputations and credibility by defending the legitimacy of nonmarital sexual behavior. One consequence of the tense silence about the sexual agency of unmarried women and girls is the absence of discussion about what feminists would later name acquaintance rape, a critically important element of sexual experience that is systematically obscured within the historical record from this period.³¹

Most of the available sources on young women’s sexual acts and attitudes, then, come from government institutions and academic and popular experts, all of whom had their own agendas. Historians enjoy no unmediated access to girls’ perceptions or practices. This project draws heavily from documents created by the U.S. Military, the Federal Security Agency’s Social Protection Division, the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the Traveler’s Aid Society, and the American Social Hygiene (later Health) Association (ASHA).

ASHA data contributes to multiple chapters in this project. The agency was founded in 1913, when it emerged from a group of Progressive-era organizations striving to repress prostitution, abolish the white slave traffic, combat associated venereal diseases, and educate the public about these social problems. World War I brought the ASHA into close cooperation with government authorities; that relationship continued in the interwar years and intensified, once again, at the onset of World War II. After the war, ASHA leaders created a more modern and scientific identity for the organization as reflected in the change in its name from Hygiene to Health, but it remained focused on preventing and treating syphilis and gonorrhea, especially among adolescents and in commercial urban environments.³²

Women and girls became research subjects—and thus made their way into my source base—when they were arrested for sex offenses, when they were tested or treated at public venereal disease clinics, and when servicemen named them as probable sources of infection on venereal disease contact reports. They also appeared in publications by experts and authorities of various sorts, such as social workers, psychiatrists, law enforcement and judicial officials, marriage and family living educators, and other social scientists. Individuals sometimes consented to participate in studies, especially interviews, but much of the data came from people and institutions that shared information without their subjects’ knowledge.

The challenges presented by sources such as these, produced by agents whose objectives and perspectives were markedly different from—or even opposed to—those of their subjects, are familiar to feminist historians. Authorities’ definitions of normal and abnormal behavior are just as central to this project as the sexual conduct that those officials were trying to understand and to influence. I am wary of any easy distinctions between ideology, representation, and experience, since these elements exist in dynamic relationship to one another. As the first two chapters of this book emphasize, institutions did not simply exert pressure on individuals; the actions of women and girls themselves also affected and helped to constitute state policies and propaganda. In fact, average people’s acts and attitudes shaped expert understandings and public policies, and vice versa. Chapters 3–5 draw on other sources, such as surveys, letters, and oral histories, which are also mediated and constructed, if in different ways.³³

My main response to these challenges of feminist social history is to cultivate a highly diverse source base and as rich a conversation between my sources as possible. In addition to institutional sources, I incorporate newspapers, magazines, popular scholarship, memoirs, correspondence, oral history, and a few novels and films. Two chapters draw upon an extraordinary interview study with six hundred sexually active, predominantly African American teens conducted in the late 1950s. With the exception of chapter 3, in which I delve into one particular group of sources—letters to and about Kinsey—each of the chapters in this book analyzes many different kinds of sources. My hope is that this omnivorous approach reveals how diverse and contested were the experiences and perspectives not only of young women themselves but also of those authorities and observers trying to make sense of postwar sexual life. Ideally, the noise created by a dense source base also helps me avoid reproducing the bias of any one particular source.

Interpreting evidence about girls and women like Annie, Theresa, Maria, and Peggy requires a large kit of theoretical and analytic tools. I hope it is self-evident that this project is shaped by and indebted to feminist theory and scholarship; I have been particularly compelled by the dynamic interplay between the history of women and girls and the historical construction of gender and sexuality. I have never doubted that it is not only possible but necessary to understand both the materiality of women’s lives and the forces shaping the conditions, meanings, and possibilities of those lives.³⁴ Broadly speaking, feminist theory has also shaped my thinking about sexual agency, which I take to mean the efforts of people in disadvantaged social positions by virtue of gender and/or sexuality (together with race and class) to express and act upon their sexual desires. The difference between sexual agency and sexual autonomy is useful. Though people’s ability to practice sexual autonomy depends upon their access to certain social, cultural, political, and economic resources and conditions, sexual agency, in my view, does not. A girl who chooses to have intercourse with her steady boyfriend and then experiences unintended pregnancy, for instance, might exercise sexual agency without being able to enjoy sexual autonomy (which would require access to birth control and abortion, for instance, as well as freedom from social stigma). Attempts at sexual self-assertion reflect agency, while sexual self-direction and self-possession reflect autonomy. Rape, of course, represents a violent denial of sexual agency, and what we now call acquaintance rape was terribly widespread in the mid-twentieth century (as it remains today). My research reveals remarkable and under-acknowledged degrees of young female sexual agency in the wartime and postwar years, though the public struggle for women’s sexual autonomy was only beginning to emerge.³⁵

Another strong influence on this project is the interdisciplinary subfield of girls’ studies, which emerged in the 1990s at the intersection of women’s studies and media studies and which has inspired feminist historians not only to pay closer attention to girls as historical subjects but also to historicize the categories of girl and girlhood.³⁶ Though Bad Girls started out as a work of women’s history, my increasing engagement with girls’ studies has encouraged me not to consider teen girls simply as younger versions of adult women, but rather to differentiate between the material, social, and legal conditions of womanhood and girlhood. There are no simple ways to define or delineate girlhood. Female youth become relevant to my research at the point in their lives that some trace of sexual feeling or action makes its way into the historical record. The timing of this archival emergence varies, so I don’t assign a fixed age at which I begin to consider girls as relevant research subjects. Since nearly all of the girls in my sources are over the age of thirteen, and most over fifteen, teens or adolescents are appropriate descriptors. Each of these terms has its own history and genealogy. The term teenager came into widespread use in the 1940s and has more cultural resonance than the clinical term adolescent, so I tend to use the language of girls and teens.³⁷

Distinguishing between girlhood and womanhood is tricky business, as that transition is itself a product of historical and cultural factors. For a social history of youth that many mid-century Americans considered promiscuous or delinquent, the most salient criterion for crafting the distinction is legal; state policies and police practices seeking to manage female sexuality were much more robust for minors than for adult women. In the mid-twentieth century, jurisdiction shifted from juvenile to municipal courts between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one in different states. But social and cultural practices reveal the fallibility of age-based distinctions. For instance, teens married their boyfriends during and after the war in part because marriage legitimated their sexual relationships, not only in the eyes of parents and peers, but also in the courts. Though it required parental consent, teen marriage granted adolescents the legal status of adults.³⁸ At the same time, the dominant psychological definition of maturity required that individuals complete certain psychosexual transitions in childhood and adolescence; but the only way of demonstrating such completion was through heterosexual marriage, motherhood, and the adoption of feminine gender roles. This meant that many people, including lesbians and unmarried mothers, never achieved the psychological status of mature womanhood. The transition from girlhood to womanhood was complicated, contested, and wrapped up in the contradictions of mid-century sexual culture. Nonetheless, given the absence of sexually active girls from the historical record until around the age of fifteen and the movement of most of them into legal adulthood, college, and/or marriage by the end of the teen years, I adopt a fluid, working definition of girls as adolescents between fifteen and