Sioux City Sexpots: Regulation of Female Morality in a Progressive Era Prairie City

Sarah Mirk May 15 2008 Professor Victoria Brown

In the first five months of 1919, Sioux City police matron Sadie Smith staked out 56 dances, on the prowl for immoral behavior and signs of alcohol. Outside one October dance, she found Faye Merriman Walior, 17, and Clara Brindley, 14, on the street with two men and brought both young women back to the station. Matron Smiths logbook omits the exact reason she decided to arrest Walior and Brindley, but the next day Wailors father took her home. The duo were forced to testify appear in court the next week against Harry Turner -- Claras man, as Matron Smith explained -- and Waliors father then requested the matron place his daughter in the Sioux City Good Shepherd Home for six months. In the absence of involved parents, Clara was committed to the home for one year. While studies of Progressive Era young womens emboldened sexual behavior and increased independence focus on avant-garde New Yorkers and Chicagoans, the majority of American women did not live in these urban centers. Rather, numerous negotiations between young women, their parents and the police over proper behavior occurred in places like Sioux City. While big cities with large municipal infrastructures have stacks of court records and police logs which document the citys control of female delinquency, the way small towns across America dealt with socially disruptive young women is less well known. Studying the conflicts over womens behavior in Sioux City is useful for understanding the extent to which lifestyles traditionally associated with big city living permeated the cities and towns of hinterland America. Sioux City fancied itself a sophisticated city around 1910, going so far as to call itself Little Chicago. While the city streets did not get entirely electric lit until the mid-

1930s and the downtowns pretentious elevated railroad eventually went bust, the bustling Missouri River city did deal on a small scale with many of the same social issues as Chicago at the time. New rail lines turned the city into a small shipping hub and its population jumped from 19,000 residents in 1885 to 47,000 in 1910.1 The first Polish family arrived in Sioux City in 1901 and was followed by multitudes of Southern and Eastern European families looking for work in the areas large meat-packing plants.2 Jobs available at the plants and at a local candy factory allowed single women to leave their family homes and live on their own or with friends. Some of these freshly independent women frequented dance halls and spent nights out drinking, a development which caught the worried eyes of the areas older residents. One of the primary ways Sioux City dealt with these new race, gender and class dynamics was to by establishing the new police department position of a matron, a female officer employed to investigate illicit behavior among women. Matrons in Sioux City and similar size towns in Iowa relied on a peculiar and not-entirely-legal system state and private partnership to police and reform womens behavior.3 The matrons personally investigated suspected deviant girls and sent those deemed in need of reform to either the Good Shepherd Home (a reform school run by a private Catholic charity) or the Crittenton Home (a womens shelter run by a private Christian charity). First hired in 1908, matron Mrs. Anne Roberts kept a sporadic log of her every day activities, handing over the job to Mrs. Sadie Smith in 1918, who kept more detailed records. The matron
1

Sharon Wood. The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2005. pp. 9 and Sorensen, Scott and Chicoine, B. Paul. Sioux City, A Pictorial History. Norfolk, VA: Donning Co. 1982. Sioux Citys population fluctuated somewhat due to a devastating flood in 1893. Between 1885 and 1893, Sioux Citys population swelled from 19,060 to 50,000. After the flood, the population sank to 33,000 but reached 47,000 in 1910. 2 Sorensen and Chicione, pp. 133. 3 Wood pp. 188.

records shed some light on the way female juvenile justice functioned on the ground in an industrializing town far from the modern cultural and social centers of Chicago and New York. When deciding how to respond to a girls upsetting behavior, the matron had the authority to incarcerate the girl in a reform school for a few months or years, put her on probation or do nothing but perhaps scold her verbally. While the Sioux City matrons did send young women to correctional institutions for behavior perceived as immoral or disruptive, the matron seems to have placed greater onus on the shoulders of a young womans parents to correct her behavior. The negotiations which took place between parents and the matrons challenged the commonly-held belief that middle-class reformers used the courts to impose distinctly middle-class sexual values on working-class families. Instead, in places like Sioux City, the arm of the law was deferential to parental authority regardless of class. Working-class parents active attempts to regulate their daughters behavior surface in the police matron records, indicating their own interest in and influence over their daughters morality. The Sioux City system of dealing with deviant female sexual behavior hinged on the police matrons subjective decision of who to incarcerate, a flexible and informal method compared to the official bureaucracy of big cities with judges and established juvenile courts. The police matron rolled the big city specializations of social worker, arresting officer, judge and probation officer into one job. It was up to the matron to decide whether to investigate complaints against women, to judge whether anyone had committed a crime and decide what action to take. Sioux Citys funneling of deviant girls from the female police matron to the nun-run Good Shepherd Home built on a nationwide

movement among reformers who envisioned effective state regulation of female sexuality via the creation of a maternal state. The desire to see the state as near as possible a real mother to wayward girls is seen in the appointment of a female matron who would investigate deviant females and place them in the Good Shepherd Homes all-female surrogate family. Sioux City police matrons daily duties changed significantly from 1908 to 1920. The records indicate that the job became somewhat more professionalized after World War One, when the matron actively investigated more officially-recognized crimes, stopped performing a patchwork of social work odd jobs and kept more orderly records (see Table One). Due to the changing duties and record-keeping method, it is somewhat difficult to perform a straight comparison of data from the records of matron Roberts records to matron Smiths. However, the shift in duties and records reflects the overall trend of professionalization of female social work during the teens and twenties. As social work historian Karen Tice points out, one of the many debates over the professionalization of social work revolved around record keeping. Around the early 1920s, social workers concerned with male expert acceptance of their female-dominated profession pushed workers to standardize language and recording practices to make the data more useful for research and more similar to scientific record keeping.4 For 1908 and 1909, Matron Roberts recorded her daily activities in a loose narrative style, keeping track of the names of people with whom she interacted but not their addresses or specific problems. Fully twenty percent of her entries were random abouttown efforts to fill the gaps in the towns social services, such as settling a family

Karen Tice. Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1998. pp. 53-55.

quarrel, finding food and money for a poor family in distress and, at a low point, cleaning up rubbish around a house. Matron Roberts also seems to have been a key person for intervention in domestic violence problems, as almost ten percent of the cases she deal with every year were incidents of male on female abuse. Other than acting as an go-to woman for social service needs, Matron Roberts primary job was investigating complaints or suspicions of young womens deviant behavior. The euphemism going to see about a specific girl is the cryptic entry for sixteen percent of her work. Only one of those girls was obliquely described as a prostitute and none of the girls investigated in 1908 were listed as girls placed in the Good Shepherd Home, indicating that Matron Roberts was able to resolve most parents or neighbors suspicions about a girls behavior without resulting to incarcerating the girl in reform school. The difference between Matron Roberts and Matron Smiths logbook are dramatic. Following her appointment to the position in 1918, matron Smith began classifying almost all her cases as one of a handful of crimes (larceny, public intoxication or disturbing the peace, for example), engaged in much less random town social work and focused her energies on strategic and systemized arrests of women for specific crimes. Unlike matron Robertss very sporadic documentation of prostitute arrests, matron Smith participated in at least four coordinated stings of brothels in 1920, arresting many women at one time. Most of these prostitutes were not incarcerated, but returned to the streets and several names show up in her logbook multiple times. Smith fined and released all the arrested prostitutes except the only one whose age she recorded -- 16-year-old Flossie Ferdig, whom she sent to the Good Shepherd Home. More than matron Roberts, matron Smith seems to have engaged in what would have been typical police work for a male

officer, except she pursued exclusively female violators. Significantly, accounts of intervention in domestic violence issues disappear from her record. This could indicate either than the cases were not considered important or professional enough to record or that, saddled with masculine tasks of ferreting out alcohol and prostitution, the matron no longer dealt with social service issues such as domestic abuse. Both matrons main duties revolved around investigating a young woman either at their familys or a neighbors request and deciding what should be done about her behavior. The matrons seemed free to negotiate with parents, community members and the daughters in question to determine the proper course of action, since all of these actors voices occasionally surfaced in the logbook. While in New York and Chicago, girls waited days or weeks in jails as investigators, counselors and judges reviewed their case, the Sioux City matrons usually investigated and sentenced deviant girls all in one day. In an environment where most town members knew each other and lived side by side, the matrons seemed to take many informal factors in to account when deciding whether a girl should be sent to the Good Shepherd. The two reform school options in Sioux City were the Crittenton Home, part of a national Christian charity that housed pregnant women and young mothers, and the Good Shepherd Home, a Catholic reform school run for wayward young women. The statistics on the number of girls sent to Iowas two Good Shepherd Homes and other private institutions indicate the mid-size city police forces reliance on the private institutions. Between 1908 and 1923, Sioux City matrons Smith and Roberts patchy records show they placed 255 girls in the towns Good Shepherd Home (see table two). City authorities in Davenport, a city of similar size on Iowas opposite river coast, placed at least 260

girls (and perhaps as many as 500) in Good Shepherd Homes from 1893 to 1910.5 Across Iowa, the number of female delinquents committed to training schools fluctuated during the pre-war years, with an average of 145 committed annually. During the war, the average number of women committed jumped slightly to 165 and stayed higher throughout the twenties, averaging 184.6 Social science experts at the time easily drew the line between acceptable and punishable behavior, but the line appears to have been more negotiable in Sioux City, where young women constantly tested the boundaries of a flexible system. Sociologist and sex writer Maurice Chideckel defined the morally corrupt woman as one who had lesbian tendencies, whose sex drive was high or nonexistent, had any sort of non-vaginal sex or preferred masturbation to sex with men. That woman is to be viewed with sympathy rather than scorn, implored Chideckel, implying that such women could probably be reformed under the right circumstances.7 In the police matron records, it appears that community members considered both tendencies toward illicit sex and actually engaging in sex acts disruptive. The behaviors the Sioux City matrons and community deemed questionable fell into three broad categories: those which threatened the financial stability of the family, those which undermined parents ability to keep close control of their daughters (and could potentially lead a girl to prostitution or out-ofwedlock marriage) and rearing children in an environment considered immoral. Out-of-wedlock childbirth was the primary burden that moral regulation intended to avoid. As Mary Odem notes, unwed motherhood placed a significant financial strain

Wood pg. 186-187 Walter A. Lunden. Juvenile Delinquency in Iowa. Ames, IA: The Art Press. 1968. Table 18, pp. 61 7 Maurice Chideckel. 1935. Female Sex Perversion: The Sexually Aberatted Woman As She Is. New York: Eugenics Publishing Company. p. vii - viii
6

on working-class families, since it not only created another mouth to feed but reduced the daughters ability to contribute to family income.8 While moral reformers are often portrayed as exposing working-class parents to middle class values, the impetus to protect young women from unwanted births may have been stronger among working class parents than the middle class. Girls apparently in danger of becoming unwed mothers due to their behavior were often placed in the Good Shepherd Home. The most explicit reference to this dynamic occurred on the log entry for September 8 1920, when Matron Smith wrote, Placed 18 year old Lottie Larson in the Crittenton Home. Was over to County Attorneys Office with Lottie Larson. She was in trouble. We found the fellow and he married her. The we involved is unnamed, but indicates a communal effort to avert catastrophe. Avoidance of out-of-wedlock marriage also explains the Matrons investigation of unmarried couples who appeared to be sleeping together. On July 9th 1908, Matron Roberts stopped by the Clifton Hotel to investigate a hackman who was thought that the girl he was keeping was not his wife. When this couple and others investigated produced a marriage license, the Matron left them alone. Other married girls received more scrutiny, however. Prompted by a complaint from one of their mothers, Matron Smith arrested two young married women in 1923 at the Liberty Hotel, Mrs. May Keeling, 16, and Mrs. R.A. Chapman alias Kokomo. Matron Smith noted that Keeling was a dope fiend and committed them both to Good Shepherd after charging both with vagrancy. The girls age, drug use and behavior apparently got them tagged as deviants despite their marriages.
8

Odem, Mary E. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1995.pp 51.

The increased independence that came with girls decisions to earn their own wages and live outside their parents homes raised eyebrows in Sioux City, since such behaviors undermined parents ability to control their daughters. The matron records are full of complaints of daughters staying out late at night; runaways who fled parental authority to find lives in Sioux City were either incarcerated or sent back to their families. In 1908, Matron Roberts sent two girls to the Good Shepherd Home for a year, offering only the insight, They lived on their own in an apt. Ten days later, the Home freed one of the girls when she agreed to her parents desire that she marry the man she had taken up with. While the information proffered in this small narrative is frustratingly sparse, its apparent that the girls parents were upset about their independent daughters relationship with a man. Unable to control her through traditional means of parenting, they turned to the police matron and the threat of incarceration, which proved effective. The third category of deviant behavior to emerge from the records related to women as mothers rather than daughters. Both Matrons Roberts and Smith obliquely referenced investigating mothers who neighbors reported for rearing their children in a poor moral environment. The charge disorderly home was often euphemistic for running a brothel, but is indicative of the fact that a woman whose let her home get out of control could be criminally punished. In some situations, the matrons threatened to place the homes children in an orphanage or reform school if the mother did not change her behavior. On Aug 20th 1908, for example, a husband reported that his wife took their little girl and a man to the Center Street Beer Garden. Matron Roberts reported, I talked to her and told her it could not happen again. She was very repentant and promised everything good. Both matrons did occasionally record removing children from a home,

10

but usually only when both parents were incapacitated. Even in the cases of neglect or moral endangerment, the matrons believed the best solution was to respect the parents authority and role. While matrons arrested many women for prostitution and other deviant acts again and again without incarcerating them or placing them on probation, the matrons immediately sent other offenders to the Good Shepherds home. The dividing line between candidates for reform school and those left to their immoral lives on the street was clearly not based exclusively on womens behavior. Instead in Sioux City, multiple factors influenced whether the matron would decide to incarcerate a woman, including her perceived ability to be reformed, whether she was infected with an STD, and her class and ethnicity. Significantly, the desires of the girls parents -- even among poor, stigmatized working-class families played a key role in how their daughter was treated. Overall, the matrons seemed to use incarceration not as a way to impose middle class morals on working-class families but to better enforce the morals of the working-class parents themselves. Those girls who were incarcerated were often those with no families to care for them. One of the primary factors deciding whether a girl should be incarcerated was the presence of absence of venereal disease. Across the country, girls hauled into court on morality and behavior charges were screened for sexually transmitted diseases and routinely isolated in either jail or private reform schools if they were found to be infected. Sharon Woods argues that in Davenport this dynamic was not intended to help cure diseased girls but to protect men by keeping infected women off the streets, creating a safer style of prostitution through some regulation.9 And venereal disease was a definite
9

Wood pp. 166-169.

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worry for both men and women: just over 50 percent of women arrested for sex crimes in New York and Philadelphia had either syphilis or gonorrhea.10 While the Sioux City matrons record is less explicit and prostitution in the town obvious occurred on a smaller scale, the matrons investigations of girls occasionally led to a trip to the doctor before they were committed to the Good Shepherd Homes. It is likely that a doctors trip could confirm or deny the existence of venereal disease and thereby tip the scales one way or another on whether the girl should be taken off the streets for the both her safety and the male communitys. When the matrons did specifically mention venereal disease, she committed the girl to the Home for the length of time it would take her to heal and then some. In 1908, Matron Roberts wrote placed Clara Christiansen in home, wanting to go there to get cured of disease, mother came a week later begging to keep her daughter in the home at least a year. Fifteen years later, not much had changed in terms of treatment. On April 11, 1923, a 19-year-old was charged with vagrancy, discovered to have venereal disease and committed to Good Shepherd for one year. The other group matrons typically chose to send to the Good Shepherd Home was composed of girls with no family, most notable runaways whose parents unwilling to take them home. Matron Roberts did not systematically record addresses of committed girls and Matron Smith only did so during 1919 and 1920, but those limited lists reveal that a third of the girls committed had no Sioux City address. Even in these cases of distant or transitory parents, the matrons priority seemed to be to admonish girls and then place them back with their families. Smith noted that several of the girls were held in the Good Shepherd homes while they waited for their parents to send money for a train ticket
10

Worthington, George and Topping, Ruth. Specialized Courts Dealing with Sex Delinquency. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith. 1925. table 3 pp 420

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home. In the other cases, however, apparently the girls had no home to return to or no parents willing to help them get back and Smith had no choice but to turn them onto the street again or keep them committed. Running away from home or unsavory servant work was a common way for young women to express some control over their lives. In Sioux City, the matron rounded up 26 runaway girls in 1919 and only recorded three runaway boys. The girls reasons for running away, but often their reluctance to return home was made obvious by several escape attempts. Several of the girls had begun independent lives in Sioux City, living with friends or male companions. Odem found similar dynamic played out in Los Angeles and Oakland newspapers which were full of daily advertisements searching for runaway daughters fleeing bad family situations or low-paying jobs.11 The parents posting the ads often blamed white slavers or abduction, but Odem suggests most runaway women left home for more complicated reasons. Searching through court records, Odem found that some girls ran away because of abusive parents, others to assert their independence and personal freedom two cousins ran straight from their familys home to a dance hall.12 The negotiations over return and incarceration of runaways reveal that the state respected the authority of families to control their daughters and illuminate the way in which working-class families utilized the court system to enforce traditional morality. Some parents came to the matron several times for help with their children and the negotiation between the parents and matron shows one of the ways in which daughters of attentive parents concerned with their morality had a harder time slipping through the

11 12

Odem pp. 50 Odem pp. 50-51

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matrons net. On June 24th 1909, Matron Roberts recorded that Mrs. Sharp brought in her daughter and requested to have her sent to a Good Shepherd home. Matron Roberts apparently decided to let the girl stay with her family. Mrs. Sharp came back less than a month later, though, asking the matrons help to find her daughter bring her in and send her to some home after she went out drinking and didnt come home. In discussing parents negotiations with police matrons, it is important to keep in mind the potential racial and class biases Sioux City authorities held against certain parents. Specifically, officials may have been more inclined to harshly judge Southern and Eastern European families due to the anti-immigrant sentiment simmering in the Sioux City at the time. In the early 1900s, according to one history, multitudes of Southern and Eastern Europeans flocked to Sioux City each year. Little was done to help these immigrant groups during the 1910s and an unfair stigma was attached to these new Siouxlanders.13 During World War One, Iowa Governor Harding banned speaking any language other than English at schools, churches, public gatherings and over the telephone.14 Since the matrons work hinged on her quick and subjective analysis of a familys morality, such social stigmas against foreign families should be considered even though their presence in the police matron records is difficult to pinpoint. Most of the prostitution arrests matron Smith made occurred in the streets of Sioux City east of downtown between the river and a rail yard, where Southern and Eastern immigrants predominantly settled. But whether matrons targeted these areas because they were made up of immigrant working-class families or simply because these areas were hot spots for transient men arriving briefly by boat or rail is impossible to discern.

13 14

Sorenson, pp. 134 Soresenson, pp. 134

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Expert social scientists at the time were also inclined to question the morality of families in which women worked outside the home. Large families crowded into small homes where the parents leave an older son or daughter in charge while they are at work, experts argued, wreaked havoc on childrens ability to mature into self-control, or the character to develop into dignified manhood or womanhood.15 A major moral danger for girls, then, was a mother who worked away from home. Odem argues that reformers also feared the independence of young working girls. 16 However, Matrons Smith and Roberts, at least, seemed to think that work brought necessary stability to independent girls lives. In several situations, they found work for women adrift or accorded respectability to working girls. On June 26th 1908, for example, Matron Roberts ended an investigation into a complaint about a girls behavior, explaining have decided not to do it as long as she is working so well. I dont think she is more to blame than her step father. On November 15 1920, Roberts specifically cited a girls unemployment as a sign of trouble, Alvina Joyal 16 was placed in Good Shepherd home as she had no home or people she was running around at night and did not work. When women with young children were stranded with no money in Sioux City, the matrons would commit them to the Crittenton Homes. However, when women turned up who were broke but without children and had no families to appeal to, Matron Smith helped them find maid work. While working-class parents utilized the matron system to enforce traditional standards of morality on their daughters, once their children were actually behind locked doors, though, parents often chafed under the states continued intervention. In 1908,
15

Breckinridge, Sophonisba and Edith Abbott. The Delinquent Child and the Home. 1912 Reprint. New York: Survey Associations, 1916. cited in Odem, pp. 106 16 Odem, pp. 106-107.

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Matron Roberts placed Clara Stove in the home, her mother wanted her back in the home and removed her without the matrons consent. Two months later, the matron arrested Clara on new charges and incarcerated her for a second time. Historian Robert Mennel came to similar conclusions about the reform schools function across the country. Working and middle-class parents turned to the justice system when family or community-based attempts at behavior regulation failed, but then often resented the states incarceration of their children in places beyond their reach. Mennel cites letters parents sent to the superintendent of the Ohio Boys Industrial School, for example, begging for their boys to be released for both emotional reasons (they were missed, a family member was nearing death) and economic ones.17 Incarceration of a child behind reform school walls meant the loss of their working wages and help around the house. The majority of girls sent to reform school in small Iowa towns and big cities alike had committed moral or vague behavioral crimes rather than assault, burglary or property crimes. Like the Sioux City matrons, judges and administrators throughout the nations justice system weighed a familys perceived ability to care for their daughter when deciding a girls sentence and considered neglected girls, rather than ones judged seriously delinquent, to be the best candidates for reform school.18 A researcher at the time described the perfect reform school type: The girl is not vicious, she does not want to do anything wrong, but she is in a critical and dangerous situation she must be kept safe for a year or two, until she comes to herself.19 In establishing the nations first reform school, New York Juvenile Asylum superintendent John D. Russ described its
17

Mennel, Robert. Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States 1825-1840. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. 1973. pg. 109-110 18 Mennel. pg. 114. 19 Hastings H. Hart, Preventitive Treatment of Neglected Children (New York: Russel Sage, 1910) pg. 7072 quoted in Mennel pg. 114

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future inmates as girls between ten and sixteen years old who were the thief, the pickpocket, the obdurate and the disobedient, the liar and the blasphemer, and should there be opportunities for complete isolation of cases, the youthful prostitute.20 However, in practice, the overwhelming majority of girls hauled in to court or sentenced to reform school were not charged with pickpocketing or blasphemy. In the Massachusetts county home to the nations first reform school, 302 women appeared in court on social behavior and sex related offenses between 1850 and 1905, compared with 115 women sent there for property crimes. 21 The statistics in Iowa are similar: in 1908, 54 girls were committed to the industrial school at Mitchellville for incorrigibility and only 9 were committed for crimes of assault, burglary or other property crimes.22 Before the spread of private reform schools, police and state authorities were often unsure of exactly how to keep these girls safe, since researchers had spelled out the dangers of placing impressionable young women in jails surrounded by hardened convicts,23 judges often dismissed crimes children and young teens committed, considering jails too harmful for them.24 Private reform schools occupied an extralegal middle ground police and parents used to control daughters who violated social norms. In Iowa at the turn of the century, girls could only be sent to state industrial schools or prison if they were convicted of a specific crime. Reform schools offered a place to incarcerate wayward but legally innocent girls for whom they still had some hope. As one matron in Davenport reasoned, reform schools were the only choice for adolescent girls
20

Barabara Brenzel. Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856-1095. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 1983. pg. 46 21 Robert Mennel. Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States 1825-1840. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. 1973. pg. 114. 22 Board of Control of State Institutions of Iowa. Sixth Biennial Report. Des Moines: Emory H. English, State Printer. 1908. Table 156 pp. 231 23 Worthington and Topping pp 433 24 Brenzel, Daughters of the State. pp.33.

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with bad reputations since no one in the small community would hire them for a respectable job, Private families are not open to them, and in a majority of cases cannot be expected to be, and there is no other place here that is open to them, except the house of shame.25 Reform schools were a clear solution to what the Sioux City matrons and big-city judges perceived as the root cause of female delinquency: problematic family dynamics. Directors constructed female reform schools around surrogate family units that would replace a girls discordant, neglectful or immoral family. One nun who ran the Decorah Good Shepherd Home justified her decision to accept a certain girl into the Home because she was from a dangerous family and needed the restraint usually provided in any well regulated family.26 From the first, reform schools were meant to fabricate a morally upstanding family environment. The nations first reform school, like the one in Sioux City, was built on a cottage-style plan which separated young inmates into small living groups based on their age and demeanor.27 Dominant theories of female delinquency of the time would definitely have influenced a Sioux City matrons decisions about how to deal with young women. Early reformers cast young women as passive and helpless victims in sexual encounters. As a WCTU reformer asserted, no virtuous woman of any age, in her right mind, fully conscious of the consequences, ever did, or ever can, consent freely and voluntarily, without either physical or mental coercion to give up the most precious jewel of her womanhood!28 The Juvenile Protection Association of Chicago viewed ruined department store girls as victims of male lechery. Their 1911 ethnographic study based
25 26

Wood pp. 188 Wood pg. 189 27 Breznel pp. 46 28 Carrie Clyde Holly , National WCTU, Minutes, 1885 cited in Odem pp. 25

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on 200 interviews with department store girls presented female sales clerks as helpless women unable to turn down the advances of bosses and customers, fearing they might lose their jobs if they did.29 By the early 1920s, however, male sociologists and other experts began shaping an explanation for immoral female that placed the blame for deviant behavior on the girls home life and personality. Ninety-seven per cent of all whores are there by choice. They want no other life, wrote sex researcher Chideckel. 30 These women are prostitutes due to unbalanced psyches deep feelings of inferiority, lack of will power and an unstable mental states.31 The idea that the root cause of immoral behavior lay with the girls own decisions to engage in that behavior resonated with both experts and parents and helps explain why reform schools focused on reforming young women rather than their male sexual partners. Sociologist Ernest Burgesss 1923 analysis of a runaway girl named Elsa clearly shows the thinking that drove the popularity of reform schools. Be good and happy but you wont have any fun, for Elsa is of the class for which this expression originated, explained Burgess, No more satisfying and sufficing to a child of fourteen are interests of good housekeeping and cooking, exclusively, than those of running around with strange boys, sleeping in hallways for the sake of adventure.32 This image of girls pursuing deviant sexual relations for their own pleasure is supported by Mary Odems findings in Los Angeles. The L.A. County Court records show that between 1910 and

29

Louise de Koven Bown. The Department Store Girl. Chicago: Juvenile Protection Association of Chicago. 1911. pp. 3-6. 30 Chideckel. p 287 31 Chideckel p 291 32 Ernest Watson Burgess. May 1923. The Study of the Delinquent as a Person. American Journal of Sociology. 28 (6): 657-680.

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1920, 77 percent of women hauled into juvenile court said they consented to sexual relations with their partners.33 Mary Odem argues in her investigation of sexual regulation of Los Angeles girls, that the economic, cultural and religious forces of large cities challenged traditional expectations of daughters and controls over their social interactions and relations with men. In such large cities, earlier methods of regulating the sexuality of youth through family, community and church were far less effective than they had been in villages and small towns.34 Odem found that working-class parents used the courts to control their daughters when traditional methods of sexual regulation failed.35 Reformers may have created the new policies of sexual control, but working-class parents actively used them for their own needs and purposes. The sexual culture of urban youth clashed not only with middle-class morality but also with the moral codes of many working class parents.36 The negotiations taking place on the pages of the Sioux City police matrons record make clear that it was not just the sexual culture of urban youth than challenged the morals of parents and experts, but that even young women isolated from the nations tumultuous urban centers pushed the boundaries of morality in a new way.

TABLES
33 34

Odem pp. 53 Odem, pp. 47 35 Odem pp. 49 36 Odem pg. 5

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Table One: Number and nature of incidents Matrons Roberts and Smith recorded dealing with in their daily logbook. Matron Smiths more systemized record keeping is apparent in both her increased recording of incidents and her more professional classification of incidents into criminal categories. The random and uncategorizable incidents (other) decrease with the new professionalized recording. So do recordings of dealing with male on female abuse and specific references to searching black women. The matrons vaguely defined investigations of Sioux City girls are present throughout the record, however, described euphemistically as going to see about a girl by Matron Roberts and investigations by Matron Smith.
1908 Incidents Total Cases Abuse Unfit Mothers Drunkness Insanity/Illness Runaways Prostitution Searching African Amer. Women Illicit Relations "To see about a girl" Other 1920 Incidents Total Charges Larceny Unfit Parenting Public Intoxication or Selling Alcohol Disturbing the Peace Runaways Prostitution/ Vagancy Disorderly House Adultery/Lewdness "Investigations" Other 458 46 10 58 36 24 99 55 8 102 20 percent of total cases 10.4 2.1 12.6 7.8 5.2 12.6 12 1.7 22.3 4.3 61 6 6 2 11 6 1 5 2 10 12 percent of total cases 9.8 9.8 3.3 18 9.8 1.6 8.1 3.3 16.4 20

Table Two: Number of girls Sioux City police matrons committed to the Sioux City Good Shepherd Home, as recorded in their logbook. Matron Roberts did not keep data from the years 1917 and 1918.
Year 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 # of girls committed 10 14 14 16 13

21

1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 TOTAL

25 12 14 15

34 18 20 31 19 255

SOURCES Alexander, Ruth. The Girl Problem: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 19001930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1995. Bowen, Louise De Koven. The Department Store Girl. Chicago: Juvenile Protection Association of Chicago. 1911. Board of Control of State Institutions of Iowa. Sixth Biennial Report. Des Moines: Emory H. English, State Printer. 1908. Burgess, Ernest Watson. The Study of the Delinquent as a Person. American Journal of Sociology. May 1923. 28 (6): 657-680. Breznel, Barbara. Lancaster Industrial School for Girls: A Social Portrait of a Nineteenth-Century Reform School for Girls. Feminist Studies 1975. 3 (1/2): 40-53. Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856-1095. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 1983. Chideckel, Maurice. Female Sex Perversion: The Sexually Aberatted Woman As She Is. New York: Eugenics Publishing Company. 1935. Freedman, Estelle B. Their Sisters Keepers: Womens Prison Reform in America, 18301930. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1981. Knupfer, Anne Meis. Reform and Resistance. New York: Routledge. 2001. Lunden, Walter A. Juvenile Delinquency in Iowa. Ames, IA: The Art Press. 1968.

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Mennel, Robert. Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States 18251840. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. 1973. OConnor, Rose. Sioux City: A True Story of How it Grew. Sioux City, Iowa: The Public Library of Sioux City. 1932. Odem, Mary E. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1995. Roberts, Anne and Smith, Sadie. Sioux City Police Matron Logbook. Sioux City Public Museum. [microfilm] Sorensen, Scott and Chicoine, B. Paul. Sioux City, A Pictorial History. Norfolk, VA: Donning Co. 1982. Tappan, Paul. Delinquent Girls in Court: A study of the wayward court of New York. New Jersey: Patterson Smith. 1969. Tice, Karen. Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1998. Wood, Sharon. The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2005. Worthington, George and Topping, Ruth. Specialized Courts Dealing with Sex Delinquency. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith. 1925

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