GRIME: Why Girls Go Wrong

CRIME

In books weighty with case histories and sociological formulas Professor Sheldon Glueck of Harvard Law School and his scholarly wife Eleanor have told how 500 Criminal Careers began, how 1,000 Juvenile Delinquents got that way. In a third fine fat book they now tell why 500 Delinquent Women went wrong.* The publication closely follows conventions last week of the American Prison Association, the American Parole Association and the National Conference of Juvenile Agencies in Houston, Tex. For many of the jailers and reformers there the texts of the Gluecks are so much gospel.

Harvardmen invented the case system of teaching law, deducing legal principles from cases actually decided in court. The Gluecks likewise cite cases of wayward women to exemplify the whole problem.

In their gallery of women there is Alice, the professional criminal, whose paternal ancestors were drunkards and thieves, whose maternal ancestors were oversexed. Alice, beautiful redhead, began to lie and steal almost from babyhood. At 18 she was a shoplifter of considerable note. A reformatory sentence did Alice no good. At 35 she is “a crafty, thoroughly experienced criminal.”

Grace, the black sheep, is the stupid sixth child of an upright Scotch Presbyterian stone mason, whose wife died when Grace was 4. During school days Grace was “nervous” and “hard to manage.” Men in the shoe factory, where she went to work at 16, found her easy prey. Promiscuity she did not realize was wrong. It was for her simply a means of getting to skating rinks, dance halls and cinemas. Grace and a friend named Edith had babies by casual sailors, gaily named their infants after each other. Grace’s Edith, now 14, is beginning to show sexual problems similar to her mother’s.

The father of Florence, the drug addict, was a sober Yankee livery stable manager. Her mother, a neurotic, took morphine. Florence fell in love with the son of the Jewish owner of the department store where she clerked. Their prolonged, secret engagement was honorable and nerve-wracking. Secretly they were married. Following an abortion, Florence picked up her mother’s morphine habit. Florence ran away from her husband, bigamously married a second, divorced No. 1 and married a third. No. 3 left her when he discovered that she was a drug addict and, between drug spells, a drunkard. To get drugs she shrewdly took jobs as nurse or attendant in insane asylums. At 54, she is still an addict.

The parents of Fleur, the prostitute, were illiterate. French-Canadian mill hands, the father an alcoholic, the mother notoriously immoral. Fleur’s first affair, when 11, was with the father of her mother’s bastard. The family lived in squalid poverty, were chased from hovel to hovel, sometimes for not paying rent, sometimes for debauching the neighborhood. Fleur’s adolescent peccadillos took place in cellars. Later she became a common street walker.

Annie, the adulteress, is an Irish-Catholic girl. She came to the U. S. with a young girl friend when she was 14. When she was 19 she married a kindly Protestant who was 25 years her senior. His great fault was a disposition to quarrel about religion, especially after their daughter was born. He permitted his wife to leave him for a younger Protestant with whom she fell in love. Busybodies had her arrested for adultery. After her reformatory term she went back to her lover, became a Protestant, has grown stout and religious.

Angelina, the psychotic Portuguese, was frail, nervous and shy as a child. She wet the bed and had nightmares. This annoyed her stepmother. After Angelina began working as a chocolate-dipper she began to run around with boys, not for money but for trinkets, meals, good times. She bobbed her hair and said a kidnapper did it. Soon after, she caused her parents more anguish by dyeing her hair a flaming red and taking to bright-colored berets, tawdry dresses and high heels. When they found her bedding in a cellar with an Italian janitor’s son, they had her arrested for being a “stubborn child.”

Minnie’s Yankee maternal ancestors for several generations all liked men inordinately. Minnie who was a stubborn, lazy, impudent and profane child likewise became “everybody’s woman” after her marriage at 14 to an old imbecile. Contributing to her delinquency was the nomadic life which first her parents, then her husband led her through the shacks of small Massachusetts communities. Two of her children, and probably the third, are illegitimate. With disgust Professor Glueck and his wife report: “The alleged father of Minnie’s third child had made a bet with some of the neighborhood bums that he could have intercourse with Minnie under a street light. He won his bet, the act taking place behind a bowling alley while the gang watched from outside the window.”

This gallery of women and 493 more like them, say the Gluecks, “are on the whole a sorry lot. Burdened with feeblemindedness, psychopathic personality, and marked emotional instability, a large proportion of them found it difficult to survive by legitimate means. Many suffered from serious physical ailments or handicaps in childhood and adolescence, and the great majority were venereally diseased before they were 21. . . .”

The typical delinquent, dull in school, quit early to work as a servant or factory hand. She played with bad boys and girls, would not go to Sunday school, often ran away from home or “bunked out.”

“Illicit sexual indulgence,” report the Gluecks, “was the chief form of their adolescent and early-adult misbehavior. All but 2% of our women had been sexually irregular prior to their commitment to the reformatory. . . . In fact, a fifth of the girls had their first unconventional sex experience before they were 15, and their average age at such time was but 17 years. Illicit sexuality was practically simultaneous with the onset of other forms of delinquency. . . . Four-fifths of the girls entered upon unconventional sexual practices voluntarily. In the vast majority of cases these erotic adventures were shared with casual acquaintances or ‘pick-ups.’ Over half the entire group of 500 women had illegitimate pregnancies, and a third gave birth to children out of wedlock. . . .”

Punishment proved a good thing for the bad girls. In the reformatory they improved in health and morale, learned how to earn an honest living. During parole most continued to behave well. “A sizeable fraction,” say the Gluecks, reformed completely. Good health, intelligence and good rearing contributed mightily to their reform. The sickly, the stupid and the vicious backslid as soon as they escaped the eyes of parole officers. Nonetheless reformatory and parole did them considerable good. Very few of the backsliders dropped to the depths of their oldtime depravity.

* Knopf ($5).