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"Bright and Good Looking Colored Girl": Black Women's Sexuality and "Harmful Intimacy" in Early-Twentieth-Century New York Author(s): Cheryl D. Hicks Source: Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 18, No. 3, New Perspectives on Commercial Sex

and Sex Work in Urban America, 1850-1940 (Sep., 2009), pp. 418-456 Published by: University of Texas Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20542731 Accessed: 20-11-2015 01:21 UTC

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"Bright and Good Looking Colored Girl":

Black Women's Sexuality and "Harmful Intimacy" in Early-Twentieth-Century New York

CHERYL D. HICKS

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Mabel Hampton's experiences in early-twentieth-century Har

lem never quite measured up to the popular image that many New York

ers (and later the world) held of the black neighborhood. In 1924, as a

twenty-one-year-old resident, she knew that visitors from other parts of

the city would go to "the night-clubs . . . and dance to such jazz music as

[could] be heard nowhere else," that the region's major thoroughfares like

Lenox and Seventh avenues were "never deserted," while various "crowds

skipp[ed] from one place of amusement to another."1 Those crowds of

primarily middle-class white voyeurs, fulfilling their own ideas about the

primitiveness and authenticity of black life, enjoyed and came to expect Harlem's "'hot' and 'barbaric' jazz, the risqu? lyrics and the 'junglelike'

dancing of its cabaret floor shows, and all its other 'wicked' delights."2 As one black observer noted, after "a visit to Harlem at night," party goers believed that the town "never sle[pt] and that the inhabitants

. . . jazz[ed]

through existence."3 Hampton's everyday life, however, failed to coincide

with these romanticized and essentialized stereotypes of black entertainment

and urban life. A southern migrant, domestic worker, and occasional chorus

This article is dedicated to the memory of Angela Michelle Meyers (1971-2006), whose

life was too short but whose spirit lives on through her family, friends, and the many people she inspired. At various stages of writing I received comments, criticisms, and encouragement from Luther Adams, Norlisha Crawford, Doreen Drury, Kali Gross, Claudrena Harold, Nancy

Hewitt, Jacqui Malone, Nell Irvin Painter, Kathy Peiss, Marlon Ross, and Francille Wilson. I

would like to thank the panel participants and audience at the 2006 Organization of American

Historians meeting, where the ideas in this article were first presented. I would also like to

extend special thanks to Chad Heap for extensive feedback as well as to Timothy Gilfoyle for

his support and patience. 1

lames Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (1930; New York: Da Capo, 1991), 160-61. 2

Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900-1950 (New York: Farrar,

Straus, Giroux, 1981), 139. 3

Johnson, Black Manhattan, 160-61.

Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2009

? 2009 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

418

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Blaek Women^s Sexuality 419

line dancer, she understood Harlem's social and cultural complexities as

she faced its pleasures, hardships, and dangers. Her time in Harlem also

coincided with the historical moment when the neighborhood was touted

by white New Yorkers as being one of the most sexually liberated urban

spaces in the city. Like that of most working-class women, however, Hampton's social life,

particularly her romantic attachments, faced more critical surveillance. With

the increasing popularity of movies, dance halls, and amusement parks, com

munity members and relatives became more concerned about how and with

whom their young women spent their leisure time. Reformers and the police also attempted to regulate working-class women's social lives and especially their sexuality. During World War I the federal government showed par ticular concern because of its fear that young women would spread venereal

disease to soldiers, thereby physically weakening the armed forces and thus

endangering the country's war effort.4 General concerns about working-class women's sexual behavior influenced the passing of numerous state laws that

were shaped by reformers, approved by legislators, and enforced by police officers.5 As such, young working-class women's interest in and pursuit of

romance and sex caused various older adults unease not simply because such

behavior rejected or ignored traditional courtship practices but also because

evidence of sexual expression and behavior outside of marriage and outside

the parameters of prostitution eventually constituted criminal activity. Even though all working-class women were scrutinized for their pursuit

of social autonomy and sexual expression, race and ethnicity influenced

the nature of reformers' and criminal justice administrators' interactions

with their charges. Immigrant and native-born white working-class women

certainly were targeted by reformers and the police for questionable moral

behavior, but generally authority figures believed these women could be

reformed. Rehabilitative efforts were less of a guarantee for women who

were characterized as innately promiscuous because of longstanding nega tive stigmas associated with their African ancestry and legacy of American

enslavement. The fact that many African American women lived in Harlem, a neighborhood seen by white partygoers (and other New Yorkers) as a

4 See Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United

States since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Elizabeth Clement, Love

for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New Tork City, 1900-1945 (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2006), esp. chap. 4. 5

See Estelle Freedman, Their Sister's Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830

1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 109-42; Mary Odern, Delinquent

Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 1-7, 95-127; and Ruth Alexander, The ccGirl Problem": Female Sexual Delinquency in New Tork, 1900-1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell

University Press, 1995), 1-7, 33-66.

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420 Cheryl D. Hicks

center of social and sexual abandon, only reinforced the libidinous im

ages of the neighborhood's residents and influenced how police officers

and criminal justice administrators assessed black women's culpability in

sexual offenses.

Young black women?incarcerated primarily for sex-related offenses on

charges that included vagrancy, disorderly conduct, and prostitution?usually

rejected reformers' concerns and often believed they were unfairly targeted.6 Mabel Hampton, for example, contended that her imprisonment at the New

York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills (hereafter Bedford) for

solicitation stemmed from a false arrest. Other inmates revealed their own

problems with law enforcement and, like Hampton, disagreed with the con

tention that their social behavior?in New York and especially Harlem?was

criminal. One hundred Bedford case files show that between 1917 and 1928

a range of black women?from southern migrants to native-born New York

ers?negotiated the urban terrain as well as their sexual desire. In particular,

forty-nine southern migrants' experiences showed how they encountered and

embraced a social and political freedom unavailable to most black southern

ers. Yet many young working-class black women, regardless of their regional,

religious, or familial background, grappled with the relentless surveillance by

police officers, reformers, concerned relatives, and community members.

During admission interviews and throughout their association with Bed

ford, black women revealed how public perceptions of their sexual behavior

failed to reveal the complexity of their personal experiences. Most impor

tantly, their wide-ranging responses provide a lens through which we might understand how working-class black women whose imprisonment, in large

part, stemmed from arrests for?alleged and admitted?sexual offenses dealt

with urban sexuality. Like their white counterparts they experimented with

courting, treating, and the sex trade, but the "metalanguage of race" and

especially "racial constructions of sexuality" influenced the distinct reactions

they received from many authority figures. In particular, the prevalence of

racial stereotypes meant that the police and Bedford administrators primarily viewed young black women's "sexual delinquency" as natural rather than

judging the independent conduct of individuals.8 Such essentialized render

ings of their sexuality as well as black female reformers' concerted efforts

to control such negative images by repressing discussions of sexual desire

6 Many women were also incarcerated for public order crimes such as drunkenness, petty

larceny, and incorrigibility. 7 Danielle L. McGuire's work provides another example of black women's testimony when

she addresses their experiences of rape and sexual violence during the post-World War II era.

"'It Was like All of Us Had Been Raped': Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the

African American Freedom Struggle," Journal of American History 91, no. 3 (2004): 906-31.

I want to thank Nancy Hewitt for encouraging me to think about these connections. 8 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage

of Race," Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 262-66. Higginbotham contends that the "metalanguage of

race signifies . . . the imbrications of race within the representation of sexuality" (262).

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Blaek Women^s Sexuality 421

have obscured ordinary black women's complicated decisions and dilemmas

regarding sex. While they enjoyed a greater range of choices regarding the

conduct of their social lives, they also dealt with more restrictive treatment

from both public officials and their own community. Their broader range of leisure options forced them to make difficult choices about how they

would deal with their sexual desires as well as the consequences of their

decisions and actions. Thus, black women's responses can offer a window

into how they remembered past sexual encounters or, rather, how they chose

to characterize them. This study privileges the ways in which working-class black women constructed their own narratives and the kinds of stories they chose to reveal about their sexual behavior. Focusing on early-twentieth

century New York, where moral panics about working-class female sexuality

shaped urban reform and criminal justice initiatives, this work also shows

how local and state officials' racialized conceptions of black women's sexual

behavior influenced the dynamics of reform efforts in black communities

as well as the tenor of Bedford's institutional policies.

What Can Bedford's Prison Records Tell Us about

Black Women's Sexuality?

Incarcerated women offer a perspective that places black working-class women's

ideas about and experiences with sexuality at the center of discussions regard

ing early-twentieth-century urban life.9 Using the cases of female offenders to address this issue, however, does not suggest that black working women

were linked with criminality. Rather, this approach reflects the encounters of a

particular segment of women who grew up and lived in certain black communi

ties. Their experiences coincided with as well as diverged from those of other women but also vividly underscore the complexity of the black working class.10

9 My thinking about working-class women's sexuality has been influenced by Kathy Peiss,

"'Charity Girls' and City Pleasures: Historical Notes on Working-Class Sexuality, 1880-1920," in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1989), 57-69; Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women

and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New Tork (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986);

Odern, Delinquent Daughters; Alexander, The "Girl Problem"; and Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New Tork, 1789-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). Some examples of black working-class women expressing same-sex desire are found in Karen

V. Hansen, "'No Kisses Is Like Youres': An Erotic Friendship between Two African-American

Women during the Mid-Nineteenth Century," Gender and History 7, no. 2 (1995): 153-82; Farah Jasmine Griffin, ed., Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of

Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854-1868 (New York:

Knopf, 1999); and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather,

Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993). 10

My thinking about the complexity of the black working class has been influenced by the work of Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative ofHosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black

Radical (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994); Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol

(New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Tera Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's

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422 Cheryl D. Hicks

Such an inquiry emphasizes how some black women understood, experienced, and expressed heterosexual and same-sex desire while simultaneously dealing

with how others perceived their sexuality, including police officers, prison

administrators, black reformers, relatives, and white Americans generally.

Addressing black women's sexuality?which usually appears in literature

or through the figure of the 1920s blues woman?from the perspective of a specific group of working-class women takes into account scholar

Evelynn Hammonds's directive to consider "how differently located

black women engage[d] in reclaiming the body and expressing desire."11

Hammonds notes that scholarship on black women's sexuality typically focuses on how black women at the turn of the twentieth century refrained

from discussing sexual desire and instead advocated behavior that rejected those stereotypes that defined them as representatives of deviant sexuality. Black female activists, in particular, promoted what scholar Evelyn Hig

ginbotham has termed a "politics of respectability" in which appropriate behavior and decorum provided a defensive response to immoral images as well as corresponding civil and political inequalities.12 Black women also

Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Tera Hunter, "'The Brotherly Love for Which this City is Proverbial Should Extend to All':

The Everyday Lives of Working-Class Women in Philadelphia and Atianta in the 1890s," in

W. E. B. DuBois, Race, and the City, ed. Michael B. Katz and Thomas Sugrue (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 127-51; Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture,

Politics, and the Black Working-Class (New York: Free Press, 1994); Robin D. G. Kelley, "'We

Are Not What We Seem': Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,"

Journal ofAmerican History80, no. 1 (1993): 75-112; and Elsa Barkley Brown, "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political life in the Transition from

Slavery to Freedom," Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 107-46. 11

Evelynn Hammonds, "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,"

differences: AJournal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2-3 (1994): 138. For discussions of

black women's sexuality in literature see Carol Batker, '"Love Me like I Like to Be': The Sexual

Politics of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, the Classic Blues, and the Black Women's

Club Movement," African American Review 32, no. 2 (1998): 199-213; Farah Jasmine Griffin, "Textual Healing: Claiming Black Women's Bodies, the Erotic and Resistance in Contemporary

Novels of Slavery," Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 519-36; Deborah E. McDowell, "'It's Not Safe.

Not Safe at All': Sexuality in Nella Larsen's Passing" in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed.

Henry Abelove, Mich?le Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993),

616-25; and Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); see also Deborah E. McDowell's

introduction to Nella Larsen, Quicksand andPassing'(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University

Press, 1986), ix-xxxv. 12

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black

Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 185-229.

Elsa Barkley Brown raises a critical point regarding the problems associated with the entire

community following a politics of respectability when she notes that "the struggle to present Black women and the Black community as 'respectable' eventually led to repression within the

community" ("Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and

Collective Memory," in African American Women Speak out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995], 108).

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Black Women's Sexuality 423

enacted what scholar Darlene Clark Hine calls a "culture of dissemblance."

In this sense they "created the appearance of openness and disclosure but

actually" fashioned a protective silence "from their oppressors" as it related to their personal and sexual lives.13 While acknowledging the power of such

theoretical concepts, Hammonds argues that using the "politics of silence" as a defensive strategy worked so successfully that black women eventually "lost the ability to articulate any conception of their sexuality"?with one

exception: women performing the blues.14 This scholarship, then, suggests that the most prominent and public articulation of black women's sexuality

appeared through the experiences of early-twentieth-century blues sing ers who expressed sexual desire through explicit lyrics and performance.15

Discussions about female entertainers, however, present one particular

viewpoint on how black women addressed sexual desire.

13 Darlene Clark Hi?e, "Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West:

Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance," in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural

Reader in U.S. Women's History, ed. Ellen Carole DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, 2nd ed. (New York:

Routledge, 1994), 342^7. See also Hazel V. Carby, "Policing the Black Woman's Body in an

Urban Context," Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992): 738-55; and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Daughters

of Sorrow: Attitudes toward Black Women, 1880-1920 (New York: Carlson, 1990). For scholarly work that explores black women's responses to negative stereotypes see Hine, "Rape and the Inner

Lives"; Dorothy Salem, To Better Our World (New York: Carlson, 1990); Higginbotham, Righ teous Discontent, Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves

(New York: W W Norton, 1999); Mich?le Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans

and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 2004); and Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the

Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 14

Evelynn Hammonds, "Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: The Problematic

of Silence," in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. lacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohantry (New York: Routledge, 1997), 175. Hazel V.

Carby addresses the heroine in Harlem Renaissance literary texts: "The duty of the black

heroine toward the black community was made coterminous with her desire as a woman, a

desire which was expressed as a dedication to uplift the race. This displacement from female

desire to female duty enabled the negotiation of racist constructions of black female sexuality but denied sensuality and in this denial lies the class character of its cultural politics" ('"It

Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime': The Sexual Politics of Black Women's Blues," in DuBois and

Ruiz, Unequal Sisters, 332). See also Mich?le Mitchell's discussion of this issue in her "Silences

Broken, Silences Kept: Gender and Sexuality in African-American History," Gender and His

tory 11, no. 3 (1999): 440. 15

For a discussion of black women's sexuality and its relationship to blues see Carby, "It

Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime," 330-41; and Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism:

Gertrude ccMa" Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage Books, 1998). Davis argues that the "blues songs recorded by Gertrude Rainey and Bessie Smith offer us

a privileged glimpse of the prevailing perceptions of love and sexuality in postslavery black

communities in the United States.... The blues women openly challenged the gender politics

implicit in traditional cultural representations of marriage and heterosexual love relationships"

(41). See also Ann Ducille, "Blue Notes on Black Sexuality: Sex and the Texts of Jessie Fauset

and Nella Larsen," Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 3 (1993): 418-44; and Hortense

J. Spillers, "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words," in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female

Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 74.

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424 Cheryl D. Hicks

Not solely representing black women enacting a "politics of silence" or

blues women expressing a public identity as sexual beings, imprisoned Bed

ford women provide examples of both perspectives. Answering the explicit

questions that Bedford administrators asked all women during the admissions

process, black domestics, laundresses, factory workers, and children's nurses

between the ages of sixteen and twenty-eight revealed sexual experiences that

exemplified a variety of behaviors, including desire, ignorance, and abuse.16

Yet there were instances when administrators became frustrated because some

black women acknowledged their involvement in the sex trade but were

reticent about conveying further details. For example, one twenty-year-old

Virginia native was characterized as "pleasant" and "truthful," but she was

also said to have provided officials with "little information about herself."17

Thus, white female administrators (and one white male superintendent) also documented black women's sense of propriety when they, as inmates, refused to talk about their sexual experiences or indicated how they attended

to traditional moral proscriptions by rejecting premarital sex.

Female offenders' responses to prison administrators might be seen as

evidence of the state's continued intrusion into black women's lives as well

as its attempt to construct and promote derogatory images.18 No doubt, black women understood administrators' skepticism when what they re

counted failed to coincide with longstanding racial and sexual stereotypes.

Consider, for instance, the sexual history of one inmate who revealed the

complex parameters of a life that included being raped, her revelation that

she prostituted herself twice, and her adamant stance that she was not

promiscuous. The administrator seemed to dismiss the woman's difficult

circumstances by focusing solely on her interview demeanor. The officiai

concluded, in part, that the woman's "better education [had given] . . . her

[a] superior manner" so that she did not have an "attractive personality" because she seemed "distant and haughty."19 Indeed, what administrators

thought as well as how they documented what they observed and chose to hear from black women shaped the information within all case files.20

16 On a practical level, all women who entered Bedford were queried about who told them

about sex, when and at what age they had their first sexual encounter, and if that encounter

was consensual. Finally, they were asked whether they practiced prostitution, and if they did, at what age they entered the trade as well as how much money they accrued.

17 Inmate #3724, Admission Record, August 1924, Series 14610-77B, Bedford Hills Cor

rectional Facility, 1915-30, 1955-65, Records of the Department of Correctional Services, New York State Archives and Records Administration, State Education Department, Albany, New York (hereafter BH). I have used pseudonyms for inmates' names but have retained their

original inmate case numbers. 18

Hammonds, "Toward a Genealogy," 176. 19

Inmate #3706, History Blank, 8 July 1924, BH. 20

Regina Kunzel addresses how historians need to understand that "case records often

reveal as much, if not more, about those conducting the interview as they do about those inter

viewed." See her "Pulp Fictions and Problem Girls: Reading and Rewriting Single Pregnancy in the Postwar United States," American Historical Review 100, no. 5 (1995): 1468-69. See

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Black Women's Sexuality 425

Yet these partial transcripts also show how inmates challenged the public discourse that delineated all black women as pathologically promiscuous. These women's responses were also influenced by attempts to negotiate Bedford's indeterminate sentencing, which, based on how an administrator

assessed an inmate's behavioral improvement, could include a minimum

sentence of several months or a maximum sentence of three years.

While exploring offenders' responses to questions about sexual behavior, this study takes seriously the possibility that black women who felt compelled to silence may have seen the admission interview as an opportunity to docu

ment their incidences of desire as well as abuse. Some women described

experiences that ranged from initial romance to participation in the sex trade.

Others revealed the dangers found by young and independent women living in a large city. Understanding that society questioned most black women's

complicity in their rapes, these inmates may have viewed administrators'

direct question about whether their first "sexual offense" was consensual

or rape as a chance to address their abuse in ways that may not have been

possible among friends, family members, community leaders, or the police. Administrators' decision to label young women's first sexual encounters as

criminal offenses reminds us of their moral position on premarital sex and

makes clear their preconceived notions about all incoming and primarily

working-class women.

Officials also documented "harmful intimacy" or, rather, the interracial

relationships they observed at Bedford. While acknowledging the preva lence of same-sex desire among white inmates, administrators seemed most

concerned with developing attachments between black and white women.

Evidence of such relationships stemmed largely from the various conduct violations (described variously as "fond of colored girls" or "seen passing notes to black inmates") noted within white women's files.21 Black women

also received conduct violations, which would indicate that they actively

participated in interracial liaisons. Administrators, however, portrayed "harmful intimacy" as white women's heterosexual attraction to black

women, whose dark skin color supposedly represented virility.22 Dismissing their own notations, officials attempted to ignore black women's participa tion in "harmful intimacy" and same-sex desire among black women.

These same officials also overlooked their own evidence of black women's

varied sexual experiences and instead based many of their inmate evaluations

on powerful racial stereotypes. Centuries-old images that defined black women

also how Timothy Gilfoyle discusses the difficult questions that historians of sexuality must

pose regarding their evidence. See his "Prostitutes in History: From Parables of Pornography to Metaphors of Modernity," American Historical Review 104, no. 1 (1999): 139-40.

21 See Inmate #2475, Conduct Record, October-December 1918, and Inmate #4044,

Conduct Record, 13 June 1926, BH. 22

Margaret Otis, "A Perversion Not Commonly Noted," Journal of Abnormal Psychology

8, no. 2(1913): 113.

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426 Cheryl D. Hicks

as immoral and pathological deeply influenced these officials' perceptions. As

scholars Jennifer Morgan and Deborah Gray White have shown, already in

the seventeenth century male European travelers depicted African women's

bodies as savage, lewd, and unfeminine, and they unleashed Christian, moral

condemnations of various cultural practices such as seminudity, polygamy, and dancing, narratives that eventually justified the slave trade.23 Such obser

vations of cultural differences shaped the development of enslavement and

led to correlations between lasciviousness and Africans generally. As Sander

Gilman has argued, Europeans eventually viewed black men's and women's

bodies as "iconfs] for deviant sexuality."24 In the context of American slavery antebellum southerners accepted the image of the sexually insatiable enslaved

woman, thereby characterizing all white men as victims of sepia temptresses.25 The direct connections that southerners made between black women, im

morality, and promiscuity remained vivid in popular culture long after slavery ended.26 In 1904, when one southern white woman commented that she

could not "imagine such a creation as a virtuous black woman," she captured the sentiments of many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century white

Americans.27

When black women were imprisoned for sex-related and other minor

offenses, Bedford prison officials' knowledge of prevailing stereotypes af

fected their overall assessment of black women's culpability. It was not

uncommon for administrators to conflate their ideas about an uncivilized

Africa with their physical descriptions and overall behavioral assessments of

incoming black women. In 1923 written comments such as "true African

type . . . inclined to be somewhat vicious looking" and "a typical African

cunning calculating eyes" indicated the depth of their prejudices in evaluat

ing individual women's cases.28 More positive appraisals such as "appears

23 Jennifer L. Morgan, "'Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder': Male Travelers, Female

Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770," William and Mary Quarterly

54, no. 1 (1997): 167-92; also see Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History," 263-64. My interpretation in this section has also been influenced by Deborah Gray White,

Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, rev. ed. (New York: W. W Norton

& Company, 1999), esp. 27-61. 24

Sander L. Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female

Sexuality in Late-Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 209.

25 White, Ar'n't I a Woman, 30.

26 Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History," 263.

27 "Experiences of the Race Problem: By a Southern White Woman," Independent, March

1904, 46. 28

Inmate #3533, History Blank, 24 October 1923, and Inmate #3521, History Blank, 20

September 1923, BH. Scholars have shown how physical descriptions of black women were used

to construct and later fulfill stereotypes that played major roles in American enslavement as well

as to define black femininity and criminality. Subjective comments by Bedford officials (both male and female) about black women's appearance seem to reiterate and even perpetuate the

earlier assessments of European male travelers in Africa who, in a different context, "grappled with the character of the female African body?a body both desirable and repulsive, available

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Black Women's Sexuality 427

intelligent for one of her race and station" and "has little moral sense but

appears more decent than the average colored girl" still revealed their beliefs

in black people's inferiority.29 Along with observations of black women

that ranged from "refined looking pretty colored girl" to "very inferior

looking colored girl," regional biases also influenced initial interviews.30

Administrators making notations akin to the following description?"pecu liar way of speaking, a drawl and a typically Southern way of pronouncing

words"?often questioned southern migrants' level of intelligence, fitness

for urban life, and susceptibility to crime based on their diction.31 Thus, not only did these officials evaluate and categorize Bedford's working-class and poor women, but their notations also illustrate their specific beliefs in

black women's criminality. In 1924 Mabel Hampton, characterized by Bedford's superintendent,

Amos Baker, as a "bright and good looking colored girl," simultaneously reinforced yet complicated Bedford officials' assumptions. Administra

tors never questioned the validity of her arrest but did acknowledge that

Hampton seemed unique. Even though she fervently denied her solicitation

charge, her comportment impressed prison administrators. They found her

"alert" and "composed" with a "pleasant voice and manner of speaking"; in a separate interview officials noted that Hampton's "attitude and manner

seem[ed] truthful" as she talked, "freely and frankly concealing] nothing" about her everyday life and what she considered to be her false arrest.32

While administrators found Hampton attractive, personable, and honest,

they still imprisoned her. Ignoring their own observations regarding her

credibility, officials judged Hampton based on their assumption that black

women's sexual misconduct, when not a direct legal violation, could also be attributed to their innate susceptibility to unfortunate associations with

"bad company."33 Hampton, however, explained her police altercation

quite differendy, as she called her arrest a "put up job."34

and untouchable, productive and reproductive, beautiful and black" (Morgan, "Some Could

Suckle," 170). See also Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs:

Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 1996), 107-36; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 135-61; White, Ar'n't I a Woman,

27-61; and Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies." 29

Inmate #3699, Admission Record, 10 July 1924, and Inmate #3502, History Blank, 22 August 1923, BH.

30 Inmate #3333, History Blank, 26 December 1922, and Inmate #3728, Admission

Record, 19 August 1924, BH. 31

Inmate #4477, Escape Description Record, 19 July 1928, BH. 32

Inmate #3696, History Blank, 10 July 1924, BH. I have revealed this inmate's name

and case file in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act of 1966, U.S. Code, sec.

552, pt. 1, subchap. 2. 33

Inmate #3696, Recommendation for Parole, n.d. (ca. January 1925), BH. 34

Inmate #3696, History Blank, 10 July 1924, BH.

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428 Cheryl D. Hicks

The "ill-feeling" that Hampton expressed "toward her accuser" mirrored

the sentiments of a number of black women and community members as

they contended that police corruption rather than black women's behavior

accounted for high numbers of prostitution arrests.35 Caught in a house raid

when her employer of two years took an extended European trip, Hampton was most likely arrested because she was "between jobs."36 The fact that

Hampton had access to her employer's home shows how she was trusted, but that same employer's absence from the court proceedings indicated

that once in court Hampton had no one to vouch for her reputation.37 Her arrest also illuminates how the courts expanded the legal definition

of vagrancy to include prostitution. During this period vagrancy laws were

defined more broadly instead of the traditional perception of a person with no employment or a public drunkard. In 1919 the New York statute

encompassed prostitution and included anyone who "in any way, aids and

abets or participates" in the sex trade.38 In Hampton's case a plainclothes detective charged her with being an accessory to a sex crime by alleging that she permitted a female friend to use her employer's apartment for

the "purposes of prostitution." According to Hampton, on the night of

the arrest she and a friend waited for their dates, "who promised to take

them to a cabaret." Shortly after the men's arrival the police raided her

employer's home and arrested both women.39 Initially, the arrest may have

puzzled Hampton, as she denied ever prostituting herself, contending that

she had been seeing her date for a month. Although she seemed conflicted

about his romantic pursuit, she also stated that he "wanted to marry her."

Hampton's perception of her boyfriend and the incident changed when

she surmised that her date worked as a "stool pigeon" or police accomplice who arranged her arrest.40 Thus, Hampton's evening excursion led

to her

subsequent imprisonment because in court the police officer's word was

deemed more legitimate than that of a young black domestic.

35 Inmate #3696, History Blank, 10 July 1924, BH.

36 Joan Nestle, "Lesbians and Prostitutes: An Historical Sisterhood," in A Restricted

Country (New York: Firebrand Books, 1987), 169. 37

After returning from Europe, Hampton's employer was apparently so "indignant at the

idea of her apartment having been used for purposes of prostitution that she refused to ap

pear" in court to vouch for Hampton's character. Although Hampton had been in "faithful

service" for at least two years, her employer disregarded various friends' advice and chose not

to support Hampton's court case. See Inmate #3696, Letter from Amy M. Pr?vost to Dr.

Amos T. Baker, 13 November 1924, BH. 38

Arthur Spingarn, Laws Relating to Sex Morality in New Tork City (New York: Century,

1926), 32-33; see there Crim. P. 887, subdivisions 1-4, especially 4e, "permitting premises to be used for a purpose forbidden thereby is valid where testimony is sufficient to show that

such use was with the guilty knowledge of [the] defendant" (33). 39

Joan Nestle, "'I Lift My Eyes to the Hill': The Life of Mabel Hampton as Told by a

White Woman," in A Pragile Union (San Francisco: Cleis, 1998), 34. 40

Inmate #3696, Recommendation for Parole, 13 January 1925, BH.

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Black Women's Sexuality 429

The Dangers of Black Working-Class Leisure

Hampton was not alone in her desire for entertainment and companion

ship, nor was she exempt from experiencing the dangers that such yearn

ings posed. Indeed, working women's longing to escape the everyday toil

of personal service labor by attending cabarets and dance halls at night

could result in arrest or what most women called a police set-up.41 In 1923

Harriet Holmes, a laundress making fifteen dollars a week, argued that

she was falsely arrested when leaving a popular dance hall. It is not clear

if she arrived at the function with friends, but when she left at half past one o'clock in the morning she was alone. The twenty-three year old said

that when she was walking to her apartment on West 133rd Street a car

stopped at the curb, and four men, claiming that they were police, pulled

her in and, according to her, "without any

reason ... declared that she was

guilty of prostitution."42 In a similar case a twenty-two year old decided

that she would leave a cabaret alone at half past one o'clock in the morning. In this instance her girlfriend refused to leave with her,

so she reportedly followed her sister's advice, which stressed that "after dark always take a

taxi" home, to no avail. When she got in the cab, "two men stepped in

with her." She fought them, thinking they were robbers. Instead, she was

taken to the police station and arrested for prostitution.43 In addition to attending cabarets and dance halls young black women

found that the cheap and pleasurable practice of visiting friends' homes

could also be a dangerous form of leisure.44 A number of women discovered

that the simple act of enjoying the company of friends in their tenement

or boardinghouse rooms could result in a solicitation arrest. Twenty-four

year-old Millie Hodges had been in New York for a few weeks working

in a coat factory before her arrest and Bedford sentence. Having recently

separated from her husband of nine years, she decided to leave Chicago

and come to New York so that she could make a fresh start. Without any relatives in the city, she sought a supportive community and was visiting on 132nd Street when her friend's boardinghouse was raided and its

oc

cupants charged with "being disorderly."45 Her denials about solicitation

and her claims that she had never been arrested failed to change her fate; she gained a criminal record by simply being in

a seemingly appropriate residence at the wrong time. Incidences such as this one reinforced the

41 For discussion of the problems associated with working-class black

women and leisure

in Atlanta see Hunter, To Joy My Freedom, 168-86. 42

Inmate #3474, History Blank, July 1923, BH. 43

Inmate #3489, History Blank, 1 August 1923, and Preliminary Investigation, ca. June

1923, BH. 44

William Fielding Ogburn, "The Richmond Negro in New York City: His Social Mind

as Seen in His Pleasures" (master's thesis, Columbia University, 1909), 60-61. 45

Inmate #3535, History Blank, 18 October 1923, BH.

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430 Cheryl D. Hicks

dilemma young black women faced in Harlem: they had the freedom to

participate in various commercial and informal amusements, but the stigmas attached to working-class and black communities meant that their behavior

was regulated on a consistent and often discriminatory basis.

Some black women, however, made entertainment choices based on the

short-term benefits of pleasure rather than thinking through the implications of associating with bad company or, rather, men and women with morally

questionable backgrounds. Scenarios ranged from those instances when

young women misjudged the character of their acquaintances to when they

knowingly associated with bad company and were led into dubious and

sometimes illegal activities. Having lived in her furnished room for two weeks

before her prostitution arrest, twenty-four-year-old southern migrant Sarah

Woods claimed that she believed that her West 140th Street boardinghouse was run by a "respectable [colored] woman." Woods later discovered that

the house had been raided; moreover, her landlady was described by the

police as a white woman in an interracial marriage and with a previous arrest

for running a disorderly household.46 While Woods may have suspected her

landlady's racial identity, she would have been less able to know of her ar

rest record, which illustrates how some women simply became caught up in

unforeseeable circumstances. Alice Kent's case nevertheless illustrates how

young women's associations with bad company could be fun but lamentable.

Once she arrived in New York the twenty-year-old Philadelphia native im

mediately made friends with people who shunned legitimate employment but

devoured Harlem's nightlife. Kent's troubles began when she and a friend

attended the Savoy Dance Hall on Lenox Avenue and there met two men

with whom they eventually cohabitated and who partially supported them.

While social workers contended that she prostituted during her New York

tenure, Kent fervently denied her culpability and later wrote to a friend (in a

letter that was confiscated by prison officials and never mailed), admitting her

mistakes: "I was furious for a time, having the knowledge of my innocence.

But I am now coming to the conclusion that it was more or less my fault

for staying there, knowing what was going on. We are always judged by our

companions. This has taught me a lesson. ... I will always remember my

(A.B.C.) that is to avoid bad company."*7 Kent's reaction shows that she understood the precarious

nature and con

sequences of Harlem's quick friendships and fast living. Twenty-two-year-old Wanda Harding, described as a native of the British West Indies, acknowledged her relationships with inappropriate acquaintances by referencing her Pente

costal background. When confronted about her misconduct, she responded that she recognized her "great weakness and craving for the attractions of this

world." She also seemed to suggest that others should empathize with her

46 Inmate #2480, Statement of Girl, 23 June 1917, BH.

47 Inmate #4501, Letter (more than likely confiscated) from Inmate to Friend, 19 January

1928, BH, emphasis added.

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Black Women 's Sexuality 431

slip-ups and noted that "everybody . . .

[was] a born a sinner."48 Harding's sentiments reveal a young woman's acute awareness of her personal mistakes

and subsequent psychological struggles when forced to face the consequences of having disregarded proper decorum. Reinforcing the fact that "her father

and mother were devout Christians" and concerned about her moral dilemma,

Harding's minister concluded that "through bad company she went astray

[and] through good company she will be brought back again to the narrow

way"49 His comment exemplifies how the negative consequences resulting from black women's associations with bad company only underscored reform

ers' and relatives' contentions that these women ought to socialize only with

respectable people and under appropriate circumstances.

In this sense, black relatives and community members, while acknowledg

ing rampant police corruption, simultaneously expressed myriad concerns

about black women's naive or wayward personal behavior. They empathized with some of these young women's grievances regarding false arrests, but,

emphasizing a woman's appropriate decorum, they also often questioned these women's decision to attend unsupervised dances, associate with

questionable people, or walk unaccompanied late at night. Relatives were

especially anxious. Consider, for instance, the mother of one eighteen-year old Long Island native whose frustration with her daughter's behavior is

clear: "Her going to the bad was going to dances and then being led by others older than herself."50 While this mother accepted the fact that her

daughter was "going to the bad fast," she also revealed how she worked

diligently to safeguard and raise all of her children properly "I have tried

to bring my children up in a Christian way have done the best I knew of," she explained, "but you know the world has to[o] many charms for young

people of today"51 Similar to reformers' concerns, working-class parents

believed in the need for suitable recreational facilities and activities for black

youth because they agreed that the urban trappings of "silk and electric

lights" and other "evil influences" such as dance halls and saloons caused

young women to go astray.52

Black Working Women's Sexuality

Although they were acutely aware of black people's second-class citizenship and supported black activists' attempts to address this problem, many of

these young women also simply wanted to engage in and enjoy Harlem's

48 Inmate #3377, History Blank, 16 February 1923, BH.

49 Inmate #3377, Letter from Minister to Bedford Reformatory, 13 August 1923, BH.

50 Inmate #4058, Letter of Inmate's Mother to Superintendent Baker, 26 April 1926,

BH. 51

Inmate #4058, Letter of Inmate's Mother to Superintendent Baker, 17 April 1926, BH.

52 "Silk and Lights Blamed for Harlem Girls' Delinquency," Baltimore Afro-American,

19 May 1928, Reel 31, Tuskegee News Clipping File.

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432 Cheryl D. Hicks

social life. In most cases they understood reformers' and relatives' anxieties

about the temptations of the neighborhood, but as workers, many employed since they were twelve or thirteen years old, a number of women doubtless

felt like one nineteen-year-old domestic from Washington, D.C., who asked:

"Why shouldn't I go out some times if I worked?"53 Indeed, many of these

women probably hoped that the easy pleasure of commercial leisure would

temporarily transport them from the everyday drudgery of never-ending

workdays as well as the economic struggle to make ends meet. When they had extra money or if they had a date, they enthusiastically spent their time

in dance halls, dancing and listening to the most popular tunes of the day.54 To the horror of most of their parents and community members, young women quickly learned popular dances, such as the "turkey trot" in the early 1910s and the "black bottom," the "mess around," and the "charleston"

in the 1920s. Rev. Adam Clayton Powell's 1914 comments still resonated

in the 1920s when he noted that young blacks' fascination with music and

dancing were "not only in their conversations but in the movement of their

bodies about the home and on the street."55 Such anxiety about how young women seemed captured by secular music and behavior epitomized black

leaders' and family members' authentic concerns about individual women's

welfare in addition to their belief that respectability was a viable strategy for

racial advancement and a stable home life.56 From whatever perspective one

viewed young women's behavior, attending dances, cabarets, and movie

theaters failed to represent the most pressing problems or inducements.

Instead, socializing within smaller, unsupervised, mixed-sex groups as

well as the concomitant developing romantic and sexual interests alarmed

adults and excited young women. Young women disclosed a number of reasons for how and why they rejected or became involved in premarital sexual relationships. These included the promise of marriage, ignorance,

curiosity, their interest in acquiring nice things by bartering sex for them, and even coercion.

As might be expected, relatives constantly sought to avert young women's

attempts at complete independence as they hoped to guide their moral

lives. They chaperoned their young women's social activities, enlisted strict

curfews, and encouraged them to devote their leisure time to church life.

In some instances their parenting may have worked, as a number of women

53 Inmate #2505, Mental Examination, Attitude toward Offense, 18 September 1917,

BH. 54

For a southern context regarding commercial leisure see Hunter, To Joy My Freedom, 168-86.

55 "Race Is Dancing Itself to Death," New Tork Age, 8 January 1914. See also Tera W.

Hunter, "'Sexual Pantomimes,' the Blues Aesthetic, and Black Women in the South," in Music

and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 145-64; and Hunter, To Joy My Freedom, 168-86.

56 See Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 194-204; Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 152-78;

and Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 76-140.

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Black Women's Sexuality 433

adamantly denied ever having intercourse or premarital sex, arguing that

their arrests for sexual offenses were strictly frame-ups.57

Relatives also dealt with the consequences of young women's disobedient

behavior. In one case a twenty-three-year-old Cuban immigrant recalled

that after becoming pregnant at the age of fifteen her aunt forced her to

marry the baby's father.58 Miranda Edmonds's experience also illustrates

the tensions within families over differing perspectives regarding leisure and

sexuality. When recalling her first sexual encounter, the seventeen-year-old North Carolina migrant contended that she was "partly forced" to have

intercourse with her boyfriend. While she blamed the troubling experi ence on her "ignorance," she was also "clear in opinion" that possibly her

parents were also at fault because she believed the incident "would not

have happened if she had had sex instruction." Her position highlights the

complex consequences of her inexperience in that she was sent to Bedford

by her mother as an incorrigible case because she chose to stay away from

home for two consecutive days with her boyfriend.59 Edmonds's case clearly shows the difference between the adult behavior young women thought

they exhibited when they dated and became sexually active and the maturity

they actually needed to live as adults.

Like Edmonds, other black women acknowledged that their sexual en

counters occurred as a result of ignorance and curiosity. One twenty-five

year old divulged that she had sex at fifteen but still "had no idea why"60 Another twenty-year-old woman noted that her first encounter occurred

because "she was [simply] foolish."61 The desire to know more about sex

prompted the responses of a number of women who revealed that they had

intercourse because they "saw other girls do it" or were "curious to know

what [the] sex experience was," and one nineteen year old revealed that she

consented because it was a "boy she had known for some time."62 While

these accounts convey these women's youth and lack of forethought about

the physical and moral dangers of sexual relationships, other cases reveal

the experiences and choices of women who understood the consequences

of such a decision.

The promise of marriage prompted a number of single women to engage in premarital sex. As romantic relationships transitioned into more intimate

contact, young men, whether they were sincere or not, negotiated with

girlfriends over how sex represented one aspect of the couple's courtship and future commitment. For example,

one nineteen-year-old child's

nurse

explained that she consented to sex because she "liked the man" and he

57 Inmates #3696, #3389, #4058, #2796, BH.

58 Inmate #3501, History Blank, 21 August 1923, BH.

59 Inmate #4028, History Blank, n.d. (ca. February 1926), BH.

60 Inmate #3722, History Blank, 26 August 1924, BH.

61 Inmate #3721, History Blank, 10 October 1924, BH.

62 Inmate #2760, History Blank, n.d. (ca. 7 December 1925), Inmate #3699, History

Blank, 19 July 1924, and Inmate #2504, Statement of Girl, 8 August 1917, BH.

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434 Cheryl D. Hicks

"promised to marry her," while a twenty-one-year-old single waitress noted

that her initial sexual relationship occurred when she was eighteen because

she was "engaged."63 When divulging this type of information, these women

suggested that since marriage was inevitable, their decision to have premarital sex failed to deviate completely from traditional norms.64 In those instances

where boyfriends refused to marry under any circumstances, especially with

unplanned pregnancies, young women's convictions about courtship were

certainly challenged. For some, however, premarital sex coincided with their

ideas about courtship, as they continually emphasized that their first sexual

encounter occurred with their husbands.65 Twenty-one-year-old Ohio native

Lena Jones, characterized by administrators as a "thoroughly decent woman," recalled that she began intercourse at sixteen with her husband.66

Yet the early twentieth century also represented a moment when young women's sexual activity stemmed from

more than a precursor to marriage

and instead highlighted these women's social and economic options. In

stead of seeking courtships, some women enjoyed intimate contact that

allowed for intercourse without an impending marriage. Single working women increasingly engaged in consensual and noncommercial sexual

relationships. Scholars have characterized some of this behavior as the turn

of-the-century phenomenon known as

"treating."67 Much like other work

ing-class women, black women with limited financial resources bartered

sex for commercial goods or amusements rather than accepting money for

intercourse. For instance, one nineteen-year-old domestic emphasized that

she took "presents from the men she went with but . . . never accepted

money."68 Another nineteen year old, Evelyn Pitts, also claimed that she never prostituted but did have sex "off and on with two or three different

men since she was 17." She, like many other young women, stressed that

she "never [took] . . .

money for it."69 Even the language some women

used to refer to their sexual partners?such as friend, sweetheart, or, in

some cases, lover?illustrated how treating represented young women's

distinct perceptions of heterosexual relationships and acceptable sexual

behavior.70 Soaking up the dynamics of an early-twentieth-century youth culture of amusement parks, movies, and dances, working-class

women

across the color line believed "treating" addressed their desire for romance

and pleasure as well as the city's commercial

amusements.

63 Inmate #3705, History Blank, 18 July 1924, and Inmate #4498, History Blank, n.d.

(ca. 30 March 1926), BH. 64

Clement, Love for Sale, 18-25. 65

Inmates #3535, #3538, #4092, #3376, #3475, #4137, #4042, #3694, BH. 66

Inmate #4137, History Blank, n.d. (ca. 7 July 1926), BH. 67

See Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 108-14; and Clement, Love for Sale, 45-75. 68

Inmate #2505, Statement of Girl, 2 August 1917, BH. 69

Inmate #2504, Statement of Girl, 8 August 1917, BH. 70

Inmates #3367, #3386, #2505, BH.

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Black Women's Sexuality 435

Although many women accepted these nontraditional sexual arrange

ments, they also understood that reformers and their relatives expressed

strong objections to such behavior. One twenty-four-year-old domestic

who revealed how she grew up with a mother who was "strictly Methodist

and insisted that.. . [her] children go to church regularly" disregarded her

traditional upbringing once she arrived in New York. She noted that even

after she started earning her own money "her mother would not let her go to a dance or theatre because she thought it was wicked." When she finally left Washington, D.C., she reportedly emphasized that "no one [could] to tell her what she could do . . . [and she] began to go out nearly every

night." She consistently denied soliciting but acknowledged that during her five-year tenure in New York she had intercourse with "three different

friends." Her experience with "treating" garnered her various presents from

lovers that consisted of "candy, theatre tickets, and invitations to dinner."71

Relatives, reformers, and prison administrators viewed these women's situ

ations quite differently: "treating," for them, represented another form of

female sexual delinquency. Young women's frequent admissions to being "immoral" suggests how they responded to administrators' specific ques tions about their premarital sexual practices rather than offering a seemingly constant and simplistic explanation regarding their sexual behavior. As with

one twenty-three year old who disclosed that she had been "immoral" but

denied that she had "ever practiced prostitution," these working women

insisted that they had made an independent choice to engage in sex for the

enjoyment it provided rather than being dependent upon the sex trade for

their survival.72

Yet black women's sexual relationships were not

always consensual or

liberating. Sexual danger in this sense was not simply about reformers' and

relatives' concerns that young women were compromising their moral

standing with premarital sexual experimentation. This type of sexual danger also highlighted incidences of abuse and rape. Young women recounted

experiences of sexual harassment from employers as well as within their

familial and social lives. Later in life Mabel Hampton recalled that when she was eight years old her uncle had raped her.73 She also recalled that when

she was working as a domestic, men in certain households "would try to

touch" her inappropriately.74 Like most women, Hampton understood that

any disclosure of her sexual abuse and harassment would have led others to

question her credibility rather than that of her attacker or harasser.

71 Inmate #2480, Statement of Girl, 23 June 1917, BH.

72 Inmate #3718. Also see Inmates #3533, #3474, #4498, BH.

73 Joan Nestle, "Excerpts from the Oral History of Mabel Hampton," Signs 18, no. 4

(1993): 930; see also Nestle, A Fragile Union, 32. 74

Excerpt from oral history tapes made with Mabel Hampton, an African American les

bian, interview with Joan Nestle, 21 May 1981, MH-2, Box 3, Mabel Hampton Collection, Lesbian Herstory Archives of the Lesbian Herstory Educational Foundation, Inc., New York

City (hereafter cited as MHC).

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436 Cheryl D. Hicks

Other black women's experiences highlight similar scenarios of sexual

abuse when they knew their assailant. One twenty-one year old remembered

that she was raped by "the husband of her foster parent," while a twenty

four-year-old woman revealed that she was raped by a "friend who was

visiting her sister's house."75 Even seemingly innocent interactions between

young women and men could lead to horrific consequences. One twenty

three-year-old domestic recalled that she was forced into intercourse at age fifteen when she and a boy "were playing school" and then a game called

"Mama and Papa" that she "did not understand" until it was too late.76

Even as they were indicted for sexual offenses themselves, these women

chose to disclose that rape?whether committed by a family member, family

friend, or neighbor?had made a huge impact on their lives. In the most

unlikely forum with prison administrators, where they knew their stories

would be recorded, black women revealed various aspects of their harrow

ing experiences. Certainly, they understood that administrators would not

take legal action against their abusers, but some women must have believed

that revealing their trauma was important enough to provide a general or

detailed story about their plight as well as mitigate administrators' negative

perspectives of them. Twenty-three-old domestic and Colorado native Sally Bruce seems to have blamed herself for her abuse when explaining how

she dealt with her rape. Revealing that her "first time was at 20 years [old] without her consent," Bruce decided to continue with the relationship,

rationalizing that "she was a woman, no longer

a child and intended to

marry" her abuser.77 Indeed, believing she had no other options, Bruce's

decision highlights the difficult choices working women made when simul

taneously negotiating their sexuality as well as the longstanding sentiment

that black women could not be raped.78 In light of the history of such pernicious stereotypes, some black women's

decision to enter the sex trade also represented a difficult choice for those

who claimed that they supplemented their paltry salaries as personal service

laborers. Highlighting her longstanding dilemma of dealing with menial

work's inadequate wages and the immediacy of solicitation's higher earnings,

twenty-six-year-old New York native Heather Hayes, a cook and chamber

maid, acknowledged that she had "practiced prostitution off and on since

she was seventeen."79 These sorts of revelations about black women's mis

givings concerning the trade coincide with the findings of a 1914 Women's

Court investigation, which argued that black women's "meager salaries and

uncongenial surroundings tend[ed] to produce a state of dissatisfaction

75 Inmate #4501, Summary Report on Application for Parole, ca. 1928, and Inmate #2480,

Statement of Girl, 23 June 1917, BH. 76

Inmate #4078, History Blank, n.d. (ca. 1 May 1926), BH. 77

Inmate #3706, History Blank, 18 July 1924, BH. 78

See Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave (New York: Bard, 1991), 104-22. 79

Inmate #3494, Recommendation for Parole, ca. 1924, BH.

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Black Women's Sexuality 437

which sometimes [led] ... to prostitution." Undoubtedly, there were

women like the twenty-two-year-old laundress who fully admitted to being a "habitual prostitute," but others attempted to show that they solicited

only infrequently.81 For instance, one twenty-three year old revealed that

she "prostituted with 2 men in 3 years," and while she conceded that she

had been "immoral," she denied "being promiscuous."82 Black women's behavior after arrest also suggests that they struggled with

the mental impact of their decisions to solicit. The aforementioned Women's

Court study, entitled "Investigation of Colored Women at Night Court," indicated that when questioned during admission interviews, twenty-four out of fifty-six women claimed that they were single and alone in the city "without near relatives"; furthermore, at least eight of these women "admit

ted having mothers" in New York but refused to provide familial addresses to court administrators because they did not want their relatives "to know

where they were." The same investigation concluded that most of the

women came from "poor but respectable homes" yet eventually buckled

under the pressures of inadequate wages and bad company. Charting their

moral downfall, the study disclosed the trajectory of their transition from

taking on legitimate but unskilled work to prostitution: "From all restraining influences they lodge in questionable districts; associate with questionable

people; work for a while; then both solicit and work[;] finally ending by

giving up their regular employment in order to solicit."83

The lure of money and the expectation of an easier lifestyle undoubt

edly influenced some young women's decision to enter the sex trade full

time. For instance, one seventeen-year-old domestic earning seven dollars a

month claimed that she was able to make "about $10 a week" when pros

tituting.84 Young women's motivations ranged from their immediate need

for higher wages to supporting drug habits. Yet a small group of women

claimed that they solicited because they enjoyed sex and needed money for

material possessions. In the same year that she consented to have sex with

her "boy-sweetheart," one

sixteen-year-old domestic revealed that she also

began prostituting for "money and pleasure."85 The temptation of mate

rial possessions prompted another woman to enter the sex trade because

"she saw other girls with nice things and wanted them too."86 Likewise,

80 Carrietta V. Owens, "Investigation of Colored Women at Night Court. From June

8th to August 8th 1914," Folder Women's Court?Negro Cases, Box 63, p. 7, Committee

of Fourteen Papers, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, New

York Public Library, New York City. 81

Inmate #3497, History Blank, 13 August 1923, BH. 82

Inmate #3706, History Blank, 18 July 1924, BH. 83

Owens, "Investigation of Colored Women," 7. For background on reformers' argument

about the relationship between women's low wages and prostitution see Freedman, Their

Sister's Keepers, 114, 123-24. 84

Inmate #2497, Verified History, 26 July 1917, BH. 85

Inmate #3365, History Blank, 8 February 1923, BH. 86

Inmate #4063, History Blank, n.d. (ca. 23 April 1926), BH.

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438 Cheryl D. Hicks

twenty-year-old laundry presser Christina Greene explained that she grew

up in New York neighborhoods with prostitution and "associated" with sex

workers "without entering their profession," although she readily admitted

that as a "young child" she "used to envy them because of the money they made." For a while, according to Greene, her aunt, who consistently "kept her back," she noted, made sure that she observed prostitution rather than

participated in the sex trade. Yet "after many years of trouble with [her] husband and poverty," she revealed that she ultimately "succumbed."87

Cases like Greene's, where women "succumbed" to the sex trade, cre

ated waves of anxiety not only for reformers but also for working-class black women. Poor black women, who made distinct choices to work in

legitimate positions, understood the impact of prostitution on their lives all

too well. Often living in the same neighborhoods where the trade thrived,

they negotiated on a daily basis their moral stance against the sex trade and

fought against the stereotypes that implied that all black women were its

natural purveyors. Although most black reformers expressed their frustra

tion with prostitution in a public forum and incorporated their concerns

in their work, likeminded working women must have also talked with each

other and their families about their anxieties. These discussions probably reinforced the contention of one twenty-four-year-old domestic who told

prison administrators "prostitution [was] . . . the worst crime anybody

[could] .. . commit because you have to do things that take away your self

respect."88 Women like her quickly asserted their conscious choices

not to

prostitute and were equally dismayed and frustrated that as working-class women in black neighborhoods they were consistently mistaken for and

often arrested as sex workers. Such instances illustrate the tenuous position

black working women faced traversing the urban terrain when they negoti ated their perceived as well as real sexual identities. Indeed, such concerns

reflected not simply black women's concerns about prostitution but also

the very real impacts they experienced when exposing their sexual desires

within their racial community.

Regulating Black Women, Regulating Harlem

During the 1920s Harlem was part of a Renaissance in black cultural produc tion that included the height of dance hall and nightclub gaiety, the popu

larity of rent parties, and a growing characterization that the neighborhood was accepting of various forms of sexual expression. Many black residents

and leaders, as the previous discussion has shown, expressed grave and

conservative concerns about the confluence of popular entertainment and

nonmarital sex. It seems that they were also particularly concerned about the

growing presence of same-sex relationships. Many would have heard about

87 Inmate #3376, History Blank, 13 February 1923, BH.

88 Inmate #2480, Information Concerning the Patient, 23 June 1917, BH.

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Black Women's Sexuality 439

the openly lesbian references in blues singers' songs like Gertrude "Ma"

Rainey's "Prove It on Me Blues" or even the much-noted, outrageously

popular, and sexually decadent Harlem parties.89 Yet outside of the music

industry and within many working-class communities, publicly expressing one's sexuality and desire, whether single

or married, was discouraged.90

Ironically, some black churches were discovering their own gay congre

gants during this time. The pulpit denouncement of such relationships, however, conflated two distinct issues: same-sex desire and ministers who

preyed on young male congregants without condemnation from their pa rishioners. Rev. Adam Clayton Powell of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a most vocal critic, briefly noted that young women were increasingly

engaged in same-sex relationships, although he did not distinguish con

sensual from predatory relationships. "Homosexuality and sex-perversion

among women," argued Powell, "has grown into one of the most horrible

debasing, alarming and damning vices of present day civilization." Powell was not simply concerned that homosexuality was "prevalent to an unbe

lievable degree" but also that such relationships, according to him, were

"increasing day by day." Powell's conflation of same-sex desire and sexual

abuse of children gained strong support from his colleagues as well as his

congregation, whose responses on the day of his sermon indicated that his

"opinions were endorsed and approved without limitations."91

Mabel Hampton (mentioned at the start of this article) was not a mem

ber of Powell's church, yet it is not difficult to believe that she would have

understood the minister's sentiments as representing the views of most

Harlem residents, since she actively sought to hide her sexual orientation

in her Harlem neighborhood before acting on her desire for women at

private rent parties. At the same time, while they may not have condoned

such behavior, most Harlemites in Powell's congregation would not have

89 For analysis of the song see Davis, Blues Legacies, 39-40; and Carby, "It Jus Be's Dat

Way Sometime," 337. 90

See, for example, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "Rethinking Vernacular Culture: Black

Religion and Race Records in the 1920s and 1930s," in The House That Race Built: Original

Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela T Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and

Politics in America Today, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 157-77.

In the context of religion and the black working class Higginbotham notes that the "storefront

Baptist, Pentecostal, and Holiness churches along with a variety of urban sects and cults

. . .

were doubtless more effective than middle-class reformers in policing the black woman's body and demanding conformity to strict guidelines of gender roles and sexual conduct" (171).

91 Eric Garber, "A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age

Harlem," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml

Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1989), 318-31.

See also "Dr. A. C. Powell Scores Pulpit Evils," New Tork Age, 16 November 1929, 1; "Dr.

Powell's Crusade against Abnormal Vice Is Approved," New Tork Age, 23 November 1929; and "Corruption in the Pulpit," New Tork Amsterdam News, 11 December 1929,20; George

Chauncey also discusses this issue in his Gay New Tork: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Mak

ing of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 254-57.

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440 Cheryl D. Hicks

found the fact that Hampton frequented rent parties all that unusual. Large numbers of working-class residents gladly paid fees to enjoy a night of

food, Prohibition Era drinking, dancing, and music while also contribut

ing financially to a fellow neighbor's rent. They, like Hampton, attended

"pay parties" and "rent parties" in various people's homes, and, according to her, depending on the night and the residence, one could eat "chicken

and potato salad" "pig feet, chittlins," and "in the wintertime" black-eyed

peas.92 She recalled that, having paid the fee, one could just "dance and

have fun" until the early hours of the morning. But Hampton partied

exclusively with other women. Her reminiscences about those moments

indicate that while black Harlemites may have acknowledged the existence

of rent parties, they would not have as easily accepted a party of women

desiring women. Explaining her predicament, Hampton revealed that, on

the one hand, as a young Harlemite she experienced a "free life" where she

"could do anything she wanted," yet, on the other hand, publicly expressing her developing and complex desires for women was out of the question.93 "When I was coming along everything was hush-hush," she recalled. She

and women like her felt safer meeting at house parties?"private things," she noted, "where you'd go with"

a woman without fear of reprisals.94

Hampton's experience strongly suggests that black women who desired

women usually disguised their feelings in public, negotiating not only the

police but also black Harlem. She disclosed that when black women attended

house parties they made distinct choices about their public appearance that

depended on whether they walked or drove to a particular function. In the

privacy of an apartment they openly expressed their same-sex desires, yet

Hampton also emphasized how much more cautious they

were about expos

ing their sexual desire when out and about within the larger Harlem commu

nity. According to her, when women attended various parties "very seldom

did any of them [wear] . . . slacks . . . because they had to come through the

streets." Instead, they played it safe and dressed in women's suits. She later

confirmed that she always wore women's suits when attending parties. "You

couldn't go out there with too many pants on because the men was ready to see . . . and that was no good." Instead, she explained that "you had

to

protect yourself and protect the woman that you was with."95

92 Nestle, A Fragile Union, 36. David Levering Lewis notes that "for a quarter, you

would see all kinds of people making the party scene; formally dressed society folks from

downtown, policemen, painters, carpenters, mechanics, truckmen in their workingmen's

clothes, gamblers, lesbians, and entertainers of all kinds." He stressed that "rent parties were

a function . . . of economics, whatever their overlay of camaraderie, sex, and music" ( When

Harlem Was in Vogue [New York: Oxford University Press, 1979], 107-8); see also Katrina

Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 94-116. 93

Hampton, interview with Nestle, 10. 94

Ibid., 11. 95 Mabel Hampton, interview with Joan Nestle, "LFL Coming out Stories," 21 June 1981,

8, Box 3, MHC. Another version of this interview is also in Nestle, A Fragile Union, 36.

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Black Women's Sexuality 441

Hampton never revealed if she had ever experienced repercussions from

having expressed her attraction to women, but she seemed to have managed her life by limiting her contact with men and those persons who were not

"in the life." She told a personal friend later in her life that even during the

height of the Harlem Renaissance and pleasure seeking "you had to be very

careful," which meant that Hampton and her friends "had fun behind closed

doors."96 For her, going out to bars was too much of a hassle because, as she

put it, "too many men [were] taggled up with it;. . .

they didn't know you

[were] a lesbian . .. [and] they didn't care." "You was a woman

... [so] you had the public [and] you had the men to tolerate," she recalled. She later

contended that while she met a number of girlfriends as a dancer in Harlem

cabarets such as the Garden of Joy, she eventually ended her dancing career

because it created unwanted exchanges with men. "I gave up the stage," she

explained, "because unless you go with men you don't eat."97

In hindsight and as a gay rights activist, Hampton spoke about herself

as a young adult as having embraced lesbianism directly and publicly, yet when she was arrested for prostitution in 1924 she may not have been

as forthcoming about her sexuality. Her arrest, after all, stemmed from

a heterosexual double date gone awry. Her experience suggests that her

later characterization of the solicitation arrest as absurd because she was

considered a "woman's woman" might reveal more about her later life

than how she worked to address her feelings and desires for women and

men at that time.98 Hampton's sentiments were shared by other women,

black and white, but the general focus of urban reformers and criminal

justice administrators as well as the federal government resulted from their

attempts to regulate the behavior of those they believed to be dangerous, heterosexual, working-class

women.

Alongside reformers' and relatives' concerns, young women's arrests dur

ing and after World War I also reflected the federal government's attempt to prevent the spread of venereal disease. In particular, a series of vagrancy and prostitution statutes landed primarily working-class women in state

reformatories and detention houses. For instance, reformers' general anxiet

ies about sexually active young women resulted in the federal government

appropriating funds for at least forty-three reformatories and detention

96 Hampton, interview with Nestle, 9. The material cited in the text refers to Hampton's

response to Nestle's questions: "How would you describe the twenties? Was it a good period to be gay?"

97 "LFL Coming out Stories," 9.

98 Hammonds argues that "rather than assuming that black female sexualities are structured

along an axis of normal and perverse paralleling that of white women we might find that for

black women a different geometry operates." She refers to Alice Walker's The Color Purple in

raising the possible reality of "desire between women and desire between women and men

simultaneously, in dynamic relationship rather than in opposition" ("Black (W)holes," 139); I want to thank Doreen Drury for her critical questions regarding this issue. See also Nestle, "Lesbians and Prostitutes," 169.

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442 Cheryl D. Hicks

homes nationwide that housed, cared for, and treated "women and girls

who, as actual and potential carriers of venereal diseases were a menace to

the health of the Military Establishment of the United States."99

The increased scrutiny of all working women's sexuality directly influ

enced black women's treatment in social welfare reform and the criminal

justice system. Originally, seventeen-year-old Amanda B. was arrested for

incorrigibility when her parents "could no longer keep . . . her from at

tending dances and associating with bad company." Yet Amanda's harsh

Bedford sentence stemmed from social workers' discovery that she had

refused treatment for a venereal disease at the City Hospital even before

considering her mother's initial court petition.100 Because of the nation's

and particularly New York City's heightened alert about the connection

between working-class women and venereal disease, Amanda's family's concerns about her inappropriate behavior were virtually ignored. Their

attempt to regulate her youthful waywardness led to her imprisonment in

a state institution rather than in the local rehabilitative home as well as to

her permanent arrest record. Caught

in a moment when their experimenta

tion with leisure and sexuality was perceived as a national security threat,

working-class women found that their behavior was deemed suspect. Black women in particular discovered that the police's perception of their sup

posed innate promiscuity and criminality shaped their arrests.

Ruby Brooks's case shows how reformers' as well as the federal govern ment's anxieties about working-class women's sexual behavior and venereal

disease continued even after World War I. In 1924 the thirty-year-old do

mestic worker revealed that as she was walking home one

evening she was

approached by a man who asked if he could go home with her. When she

responded, "No, I have no place to take you," another man appeared and

arrested her for prostitution. Brooks, with no prior criminal record and a

solid work history, believed that her arrest had been a frame-up and con

tended that she would not have been sent to Bedford if she had not been

adamant about keeping "her arrest from her family," with whom she still

lived. Other case file evidence, however, indicates that her imprisonment more than likely stemmed from the fact that she had tested positive for a

venereal disease. Brooks's claim that she had only had intercourse with her

fianc? was recorded but ignored, as he was investigated rather than clinically tested. For prison administrators, regardless of Brooks's verified background and upstanding fianc?, her medical condition posed a danger to society, thus

justifying her yearlong imprisonment and multiple parole delays until she

99 Mary Macey Dietzler, Detention Houses and Reformatories as Protective Social Agencies

in the Campaign of the United States Government against Venereal Diseases (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), 27. See also Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 52-121; and Clement, Love for Sale, 114^3.

100 Edith R. Spaulding, An Experimental Study of Psychopathic Delinquent Women (New

York: Patterson Smith, 1923), 271-72.

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Black Women's Sexuality 443

was cured with medical treatments. For Brooks, the arrest and imprison ment were simply unjust and disregarded all of her personal attempts to live

morally. "Being that I have worked all my life for 30 years," she explained, "I think it's pretty hard to be arrested."102 Imprisoned in the same year as

Mabel Hampton, Brooks believed that she understood the parameters of

moral and legal behavior, but Bedford officials felt differently. Their objec tives entailed rehabilitating and controlling the purported sexual deviancy of women as similar but distinct as both of these women.

Bedford and Racial Segregation

By the time of Brooks's and Hampton's arrests, Bedford had already long worked to fulfill its basic objective to reform young women. The opening of the institution in 1901 occurred simultaneously with changing percep tions of aberrant female behavior, from nineteenth-century fallen woman to

twentieth-century sexual delinquent. During the 1870s reformers addressing the growing number of young women in custodial prisons pushed for the

institution because they believed it would play a major role in rehabilitating

wayward women and primarily first offenders between the ages of sixteen

and thirty; they believed that young female offenders had the capacity to be

reformed.103 Thus, during Bedford's initial years administrators believed that

working-class women's delinquent behavior could be redressed and even

eliminated through proper training. The institution's first superintendent, Katharine Bement Davis, noted that Bedford received "women capable of such

education and industrial training" that "would restore them to society, self

respecting and self-supporting."104 City magistrates and some state legislators,

however, found the practical application of the reformatory's objective too

expensive, and it was consistently underfunded. Reformers protested, arguing that expenses related to rehabilitation far outweighed the consequences of be

ing apathetic about urban crime and that the institution's three-year sentence

was an insufficient training period for certain women. Bedford administrators

contended that "the cost to the State of allowing [young women] to lead

dishonorable, and perhaps criminal lives, . . .

[perpetuating] their kind in

101 Inmate #3715, Recommendation for Parole, ca. 1925, BH. This inmate

was considered

for parole from February until August 1925 but was not released because of her venereal

disease. 102

Inmate #3715, History Blank, 12 August 1924, BH. 103

See Barbara Brenzel, Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School

for Girls in North America, 1856-1905 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983); Freedman,

Their Sister's Keepers; and Alexander, The "Girl Problem. *

104 Katharine Bernent Davis, "A Plan for the Conversion of the Laboratory of Social Hy

giene at Bedford Hills in to a State Clearing House . . .

," Bureau of Social Hygiene General

Material 1911-16, Box 6, Record Group 2, Rockefeller Boards, Rockefeller Archive Center,

Tarrytown, New York.

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444 Cheryl D. Hicks

succeeding generations in an ever-increasing propensity to evil [was] so very

great that the State [should consider these women's] reformation ... as the

cheapest means of securing the public welfare."105

Reformers instituted a number of practical initiatives with varying degrees of success. Over the years the institution maintained administrative policies

whereby inmates were constantly occupied through industrial classes, reli

gious services, and extracurricular activities. Instead of prison cells,

women

resided in individual cottages with designated matrons who encouraged a

family-style structure. Some inmates seemed to enjoy this arrangement, as

a number of paroled women wrote Bedford for permission to come back to

visit their friends.106 Specific buildings separated inmates by age in 1901, but

by 1924, the year that Ruth Brooks and Mabel Hampton were admitted, Bedford had become segregated according to an inmate's psychological

diagnosis and race, with cottages designated for a range of inmates from

feebleminded white girls to newly admitted colored girls.107 Some women

found interacting with fellow inmates frustrating and even detrimental to

their eventual discharge. Brooks, for instance, was so

anxiety-ridden about

how other black inmates' behavior would affect her release that she wrote

prison administrators: "I was not brought up to fight and curse and I am

willing to take any kind of [parole] job ... as long as I get away from

here."108 Brooks's trouble with unruly cottagemates and her location in

segregated housing reflected some of the major changes and problems Bedford experienced in implementing reform.

Although administrators insisted that inadequate funding affected Bed

ford's upkeep, hiring practices, and expansion, they also agreed that proba tion (supervision of a woman within her community without imprisonment)

changed the type of inmate they received.109 Introduced in 1901, probation

105 New Tork State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, Second Annual Report for the

New Tork State Reformatory for Women at Bedford (Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon, 1902), 7. Almost

twenty-four years later Bedford still assessed its mission based on young women's need to be

rehabilitated because, as administrators believed, young women were either "unfit to make

the fight alone" or represented women whose lives were "wrecked by chance misfortune."

See New Tork State, Salient Facts about the New Tork State Reformatory for Women, Bedford Hills (Bedford Hills, N.Y.: Reformatory, 1926), 3.

106 See, for example, Inmate #2507, Letter from Inmate to Superintendent Cobb, 1 March

1920, BH. 107

New Tork State Reformatory for Women at Bedford, Annual Report of the New Tork State

Reformatory for Women at Bedford for the Tear Ending September 30,1901 (Albany, N.Y.: J. B.

Lyon, 1902), 17-18. Expectant mothers and inmates with children no more than two years old were also housed in a separate cottage. See Isabel Barrows, "Reformatory Treatment of

Women in the United States," in Penal and Reformatory Institutions, ed. Charles Richmond

Henderson (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910), 156. 108

See Inmate #3715, Letter from Inmate to Superintendent Baker (Harriman Cottage), 7 August 1925, BH. According to a State Commission of Prisons report, Harriman Cottage

was designated for "more unruly colored girls." State of New Tork, State Commission of Prisons,

Thirty-First Annual Report (Albany, N.Y.: Commission, 1925), 172. 109

Freedman, Their Sister's Keepers, 138-39.

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Black Women's Sexuality 445

slowly parceled out the most redeemable female offenders, according to

Bedford administrators, and left the institution with an incoming population of probation violators, recidivists, and uncontrollable women.110 Superinten dent Davis identified such inmates as the major impediment to Bedford's

rehabilitation process. As early as 1906 Davis argued that if Bedford was to

"receive so large a proportion of 'difficult' young women, whom probation and private institutions

. . . [had] failed to help, the public must recognize the task" Bedford had before it.111 Probation did not significantly decrease

black women's presence, as they had difficulty obtaining it; however, their

numbers increased as the institution's reputation as a model reformatory declined. Thus, most black women who were first-time offenders, like Brooks

and Hampton, were admitted along with those white women whose behavior

failed to warrant probation or who had violated probation. These problems were exacerbated by the fact that more young women overall were being committed to Bedford, which led to subsequent overcrowding.112

Bedford's problems with funding, increasing numbers of problematic

inmates, and overcrowding led to a scathing 1914 State Commission of

Prisons inspection report that culminated in several public hearings a year later.113 While the commission report noted myriad problems with Bedford, from its location to how it should be more self-sustaining because it held

"several hundred able-bodied young women delinquents whose labors should

suffice for their maintenance," Inspector Rudolph Diedling focused on the

institution's inability to properly address its disciplinary problems.114 In 1915

during public hearings Diedling's criticisms were addressed, but investigators added an issue to the investigator's list by noting that the most troubling is

sue involved same-sex romances between black and white inmates. Bedford's

administrators publicly disclosed that the institution's primary disciplinary dilemma stemmed from "harmful intimacy," or, rather, interracial sex.115

When the State Board of Charities' special investigative committee ad

dressed Bedford's "harmful intimacy," it focused on the fact that, unlike most women's prisons in the North as well as in the South, Bedford was

110 Charles L. Chute, "Probation and Suspended Sentence," Journal of Criminal Law and

Criminology 12, no. 4 (1922): 559. 111

State of New York, New Tork State Reformatory for Women at Bedford, Sixth Annual Report

of the New Tork State Reformatory Women at Bedford (Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon, 1906), 17. Davis

revealed that the change in the type of inmate committed to Bedford was noticed in 1905. 112

Freedman, Their Sister's Keepers, 138-39. 113

For the report see State of New Tork, State Commission of Prisons, Twentieth Annual

Report of the State Commission of Prisons (Albany, N.Y.: Commission, 1914), 116-19. For

the hearings see State of New Tork, State Board of Charities, Report of the Special Committee

Consisting of Commissioners Kevin, Smith, and Mulry, Appointed to Investigate the Charges Made against the New Tork State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, N.T. (Albany, N.Y.:

J. B. Lyon, 1915), 3-29. 114

State Commission of Prisons, Twentieth Annual Report, 116-19, at 117. 115

For the administrators' reference to harmful intimacy see Report of the Special Com

mittee, 7.

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446 Cheryl D. Hicks

integrated. When questioned about this policy, former superintendent Katharine Davis explained that she did "not believe in segregation by color in principle and [had] not found it to work well in practice."116 The

committee strongly recommended otherwise. With Davis no longer the

superintendent, Bedford's board of managers agreed with the committee's

final recommendations, which cited segregation as the most viable solu

tion to inappropriate interracial relationships.117 Denying that its concerns

were based on racism, the board argued that it made no objection to the

housing of black and white inmates because of race. Its members' deci

sion stemmed from the fact that they found "undoubtedly true that most

undesirable sex relations [grew] out of [the] . . .

mingling of the two

races."118 As such, the board defended its right to segregate inmates against the protest of those who argued that racial segregation was "contrary to

the equal rights of all citizens under the Constitution."119 Explaining the discretionary power given to them by the State Charities Law, the

board argued that "individual [inmate] rights [were] not disturbed by the

separation of delinquents into groups when such segregation [was] likely to promote reformation and prevent undesirable relations."120 In 1917

Bedford institutionalized racial segregation, with two cottages "set apart" for black women.121 Superintendent Helen Cobb also explained that in

addition to disciplinary concerns, the separate cottages were established as

a result of written requests by black inmates.122 During Mabel Hampton's and Ruth Brooks's imprisonments at Bedford, designated cottages housed

black women who were characterized as "recently admitted," "younger,"

"more unruly," and "quiet."123 Ironically, even after racial segregation

was

established administrators failed to acknowledge publicly that "harmful

intimacy" persisted as inmates continued to pursue relationships with one

another.124

116 "Miss Davis Stands by Bedford Home," New Tork Herald, 24 December 1914, 8.

117 Report of the Special Committee, 26-27.

118 Ibid., 26.

119 State of New Tork, State Board of Charities, Annual Report for the Tear 1915 (Albany,

N.Y., 1915), 96. Although the Bedford's board of managers described its response to critics, the report did not specify who had opposed its decision.

120 Ibid.

121 State of New Tork, New Tork State Reformatory for Women at Bedford, Seventeenth

Annual Report of the New Tork State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, NT (Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon, 1918), 8.

122 Ibid., 8, 16.

123 State of New Tork, State Commission of Prisons, Thirty-first Annual Report of the State

Commission of Prisons (Albany, N.Y.: Commission, 1925), 172. 124

See, for example, Inmate #4044, Conduct Record, 13 June 1926, BH. One white

inmate was cited in this record as having aided a black inmate who "passed a note from one of

the Gibbons girls [black inmates]" to a white inmate during an institutional baseball game.

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Black Women's Sexuality 447

"Harmful Intimacy": Interracial Sex within

and outside of bedford

The actions of Bedford administrators and state officials coincided with

the concerns of most early-twentieth-century women's prison administra

tors, psychiatrists, and reformers. Generally, they addressed the issue of

female homosexuality by emphasizing, to the virtual exclusion of other

romantic and/or sexual attachments, the problem of developing relation

ships between white and black inmates.125 They portrayed white women's

desires in same-sex, interracial relationships within the confines of the

prison as a longing for masculinity.126 The body of scientific observers

argued, as did psychologist Margaret Otis in 1913, that whether viewed

as "an affair simply for fun and . . . lack of anything more interesting to

take up their attention" or a relationship of "serious fascination and . . .

intensely sexual nature," the racial and gendered identities of such affairs were clear.127 "The difference in color," Otis explained, "takes the place of difference in sex."128 Otis's explanation of same-sex desire equated black women's darker skin color with virility; moreover, such relation

ships could be described as "racialized gender inversion."129 In fact, she

revealed that one white woman "admitted that the colored girl she loved

seemed the man."130 Similarly, in 1921 a Bedford official explained that

black women's supposed "abandon and virility . . . offered" white women

"the nearest substitute" for the opposite sex.131 According to her, black

125 Estelle Freedman, "The Prison Lesbian: Race, Class, and the Construction of the Ag

gressive Female Homosexual, 1915-1965," Feminist Studies 22, no. 2 (1996): 400-401. 126

Freedman notes that "at the same time, assigning the male aggressor role to Black

women and preserving a semblance of femininity for their white partners racialized the

sexual pathology of inversion. In this interpretation, white women were not really lesbians, for they were attracted to men, for whom Black women temporarily substituted. Thus the

prison literature racialized both lesbianism and butch/femme roles, implicitly blaming Black

women for aggression and, indeed, homosexuality, by associating them with a male role"

(Freedman, "The Prison Lesbian," 400-401). See also Anne Meis Knupfer, '"To Become

Good, Self-Supporting Women': The State Industrial School for Delinquent Girls at Geneva,

Illinois, 1900-1935," Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, no. 4 (2000): 437-41; and Sarah

Potter, "'Undesirable Relations': Same-Sex Relationships and the Meaning of Sexual Desire

at a Women's Reformatory during the Progressive Era," Feminist Studies 30, no. 2 (2004): 394-415.

127 Otis, "A Perversion," 113-14.

128 Ibid., 113.

129 Regina G. Kunzel, "Situating Sex: Prison Sexual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth-Century

United States," GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, no. 3 (2002): 262. 130

Otis, "A Perversion," 114. 131

Edith Spaulding, "Emotional Episodes among Psychopathic Delinquent Women,"

Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 54, no. 4 (1921): 305. As Hazel V. Carby argues in

her study of black female writers' response to ideologies of white and black womanhood, "the

figurations of black women existed in an antithetical relationship with the values embodied

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448 Cheryl D. Hicks

women functioned as masculine substitutes who fulfilled white women's

heterosexual desire. Observations of white women's attraction for one

another were categorized as nothing more than crushes (young women's

courtship of one another during which, according to one report, they "vow that they will be friends forever, dream and plan together, confide

their deepest secrets"), with no serious connection to homosexuality.132 Thus, white inmates, whether aggressors in the affairs or not, maintained

a normative and heterosexual status. In this sense administrators failed to

address directly same-sex desire but rather constructed their explanations so that, as Regina Kunzel notes, "homosexuality was heterosexuality; the

unnatural was natural."133 In contrast to white inmates, black women at

Bedford were rarely portrayed as initiating relationships, although they

may have done so.134 They also were not characterized as responding in like

manner to the attention of white women.135 Black women's sexuality on

its own terms, as a crush, heterosexual or homosexual, was ignored.136

Even though officials noted numerous instances of intense and sometimes even violent romantic relationships among white women, they continually focused on the impact of interracial sex. Accordingly, they consistently

agreed with the assessment of assistant superintendent Julia Jessie Taft, who defined the disciplinary problem as stemming from "colored girls

[who were] extremely attractive to certain white girls" and who also noted

the fact that "the feeling [was] apt to be more intense than between white

in the cult of true womanhood, an absence of the qualities of piety and purity being a crucial

signifier. Black womanhood was polarized against white womanhood in the structure of the

metaphoric system of female sexuality, particularly through the association of black women

with overt sexuality and taboo sexual practices" (Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 32). 132

J. L. Moreno, Who Shall Survive?: A New Approach to the Problems of Human Inter

relations (Washington, D.C.: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing, 1934), 229; see also

Elizabeth Lunbeck, Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 295-96. 133

Kunzel, "Situating Sex," 262. 134

Otis, "A Perversion," 114. 135

Moreno noted that black women were "the subject adored and rarely the wooer. . . .

While overtly she responds with affection, she almost invariably ridicules the courtship" ( Who

Shall Survive? 230). 136

Alexander, The "Girl Problem," 92; Nicole Hahn Rafter, Creating Born Criminals

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 181-82. White working-class women's arrest

and imprisonment for sexual delinquency departed from the traditional script of the virtuous

white woman needing protection from the black male rapist, yet administrators' concerns and

responses to interracial same-sex romantic relationships showed how they were influenced still

by society's longstanding anxieties about white female and black male unions, even to the

point of perceiving black women as men. See Freedman, "The Prison Lesbian," 399^00; and

Kunzel, "Situating Sex," 261-62. For more on the protection of white women from black

men see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's cogent analysis of the rape-lynch narrative in her "'The Mind

that Burns in Each Body': Women, Rape and Racial Violence," in Powers of Desire: The Politics

of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: New

American Library, 1983), 328-49. Bedford's accounts were distinct from most institutions in

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Black Women's Sexuality 449

girls alone."137 Taft emphasized that black women had an "unfortunate

psychological influence" on white inmates.138 One white woman's attrac

tion for black women, for instance, was noted as being so "extreme" that

she was described as staring at her "temporary object of.

. . affection as an

animal might watch its prey, oblivious to all that was going on about her."139

Yet such cases never diminished the number of similar incidents among white women. What, then, did officials find so damaging about "harmful

intimacy"? Siobhan Somerville's work suggests that interracial relationships in reformatories highlighted "two tabooed sexualities?miscegenation and

homosexuality."140 During the 1915 State Board of Charities inquiry inves

tigators certainly raised concerns about both "harmful intimacy" continuing

beyond the women's release from Bedford and the concomitant possibility of white women living in black neighborhoods.141 With no likelihood of

creating a separate state institution for black inmates (as some administrators

suggested), Bedford officials' solution to this dilemma entailed imposing racial segregation. Ironically, this decision failed to address how "harmful

intimacy" thrived among women living in different buildings. Indeed, administrators ignored Taft, who testified that she dealt with same-sex

relationships "all the time" and stressed that these romantic attachments

usually occurred between women "in separate houses."142 Racial segrega

tion, as a result, would not solve the problem of same-sex relationships, but

it would address institutional and national anxieties about interracial sex.

Between 1916 and 1918 psychiatrist Edith Spaulding of Bedford's Labo

ratory of Social Hygiene conducted the most extensive and documented

study into "harmful intimacy." Examining those women who were deemed

psychopathic, Spaulding concentrated primarily on white inmate behavior.

Although she diagnosed some black inmates, a number of the black women

whom she referenced worked in the hospital as laundresses, housecleaners, and cooks. Bedford's accounts were distinct from those of most institutions

in that they argued that black inmates were passive recipients rather than

aggressive participants in homoerotic relationships. Spaulding's findings

that they argued that black inmates were passive recipients rather than aggressive participants in homoerotic relationships.

137 Report of the Special Committee, 18.

138 Ibid.

139 Spaulding, An Experimental Study, 329.

140 Siobhan Somerville, "Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body,"

Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 2 (1994): 260. Somerville poses the cogent question: "Did the girls' intimacy trouble the authorities because it was homosexual or because it was

interracial?" (261). Also see Lisa Duggan's discussion in Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and

American Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). 141

Report of the Special Committee, 18. Committee investigators asked Taft, "Do you think

the relations between the white girls and the colored girls may be continued after the white girls leave the institution so that they may take up with living in colored neighborhoods?" (ibid.).

142 Ibid., 17-18.

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450 Cheryl D. Hicks

reinforced administrators' premise that the attraction white women felt

toward black women stemmed from the fact that black inmates seemed more masculine. One example may be found in her analysis of Amanda B., the seventeen year old noted earlier who was charged with incorrigibility but imprisoned because she had contracted a venereal disease. When writ

ing about Amanda's experience as an employee, Spaulding described the

teenager as a problem because white inmates desired her. Eventually, she was

removed from the hospital because of the "infatuation which two white girls showed for her and the resulting disturbance caused by their jealousy."143 For Spaulding, Amanda's appearance as a "young colored woman with

thick lips and very dark skin" made her seem virile and thus accounted for

her popularity among white inmates.144 She further explained that Amanda was "not unattractive in personality and always ready for fun, [but] she

readily supplied through her racial characteristics a feminine substitute for

the masculine companionship [white women] were temporarily denied."145

Spaulding's analysis implicitly contended that Amanda became a possible

partner for white women because of specific "racial characteristics." She

rejected the possibility of genuine and mutual interracial, same-sex desire

because only "feebleminded" white inmates became "attached to" Amanda.

Interestingly enough, Spaulding also portrayed Amanda as an unwitting and thoroughly desexualized object of desire who was "fairly passive in the

affair," although "she enjoy[ed] the situation keenly."146 The attraction that white inmates expressed for black

women like Amanda

was usually diagnosed by administrators as mental deficiency (in ways that

ranged from feeblemindedness to psychopathy) as well as being symptomatic of their working-class backgrounds. When defending Bedford from charges that the institution fomented interracial, same-sex relationships, the president of Bedford's board of managers, James Woods, argued that these associations

were initiated before the women entered the reformatory. His brief discus

sion conflated inmates' working-class status with deviant sexual behavior.

Addressing the overall problem without direct reference to black women, Woods in fact suggested that white women desired women outside of the

143 Spaulding, An Experimental Study, 270.

144 Ibid., 272. In another case white inmates were equally attracted to Emily J., a black

inmate who in Spaulding's assessment had "thick lips, [and] deeply pigmented skin" (306).

Charged with solicitation, the seventeen year old's presence reportedly elicited an "emotional

disturbance" because, in Spaulding's estimation, "unstable white girls were uncontrollably attracted to [Emily]

. . . because of her color" (308). 145

Ibid., 273; see also Edith Spaulding, "An Emotional Crisis," Mental Hygiene 5 (1921): 279. Nicole Hahn Rafter contends that although Spaulding "racializes lesbianism from a white, heterosexual perspective" and makes no attempt to "pathologize it," her lack of interest in a

more sustained analysis stems from her study's timing (Creating Born Criminals, 181); see

also Julian Carter, "Normality, Whiteness, Authorship: Evolutionary Sexology and the Primi

tive Pervert," in Science and Homosexualities, ed. Vernon A. Rosario (New York: Routledge,

1997), 168-69. 146

Spaulding, An Experimental Study, 273.

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Black Women's Sexuality 451

prison, concluding that this behavior was "not uncommon among the people of this class and character in the outside world, and when inmates addicted

to these practices [came] into the institution it [was] practically impossible to prevent them finding an opportunity in some way or other to continue

them."147 Woods's assessment provides an

example of how administrators

attempted to deflect responsibility for an increasing disciplinary problem but

also raised the idea that these relationships should not be solely defined as

"situational homosexuality" or rather the consequence of a commitment in

a women's reformatory.148 Instead, Woods's perspective highlighted what

administrators had already discovered, that these homoerotic relationships, as the earlier discussion of Mabel Hampton's experience reveals, were a part of developing sex practices in the larger society, black and white.

While officials writing about Bedford's "harmful intimacy" framed these

relationships as aggressive white women pursuing passive black women, the reality of their observations suggests more complex evidence of black

women's individual sexual agency and desire. From their records, black

women seemed to be active participants in interracial romances. Spaulding, for instance, observed but failed to reassess her conclusions about "harmful

intimacy" in light of a black inmate's pursuit of a white inmate: "While the

girls were at chapel, a popular colored girl was reprimanded for talking to

the white girl of her affections. When asked to change her seat the colored

girl became defiant and there ensued an unpleasant episode in the midst

of the service, in which she had to be taken from the room for striking the

matron who had spoken to her."149 Conduct infractions in black women's

files?such as "passing a note" or "2 girls in room with door closed. In

room indefinitely"?indicate the possibility of same-sex relationships, but

the fact that these reports were written in race-neutral language also strongly

suggests the existence of intraracial romances.150 Spaulding's observation

of a disturbance caused by the "deep affection" that one black inmate held

for another black woman mirrored the problems that she observed with

white inmates, in that the two black women created a disturbance when

one admired the other. Apparently more concerned with whether these

women finished their jobs as hospital laundresses, Spaulding seemed to

dismiss the sexual implications behind their actions and finally explained the altercation by linking their conduct as "two tigresses" to racial violence,

noting that "primitive fires ofthat kind do not die down."151 Like other

administrators' observations of black women's involvement in "harmful

147 Report of the Special Committee, 8. See also Potter, "Undesirable Relations," 400.

148 Kunzel, "Situating Sex," 253-70, esp. 253-56.

149 Spaulding, "Emotional Episodes," 305.

150 Inmate #2466, Conduct Report, 12 May 1919,27 October 1919, BH. See also conduct

infractions such as "writing notes" and "receiving a note." Inmate #2496, Conduct Report, 9 May 1918, 23 July 1918, BH.

151 Edith Spaulding, "The Problem of

a Psychopathic Hospital Connected with a Re

formatory Institution," Medical Record 99, no. 20 (1921): 818. Yet the issue of interracial

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452 Cheryl D. Hicks

intimacy," Spaulding provided no sustained analysis of the detrimental moral

effects of such attachments. Her and other officials' lack of concern might

represent what they saw as general knowledge rather than their ignoring aberrant reformatory conduct. In this sense black inmates' behavior seemed

to confirm prevailing beliefs about black women's innate promiscuity and

resulting sexual deviancy. While not contradicting general sexual stereotypes regarding black

women, the case of Lynette Moore does show how a black woman's behav

ior and appearance disrupted prison administrators' questionable premise

regarding "harmful intimacy." According to one Bedford superintendent,

seventeen-year-old Moore did "fairly well" while imprisoned but had a

"great attraction for . . . white girls," making her

a "troublemaker."152

Initially, Moore's physical appearance?she was described as a "colored girl with . . . light skin and rather pretty, wavy hair"?garnered just as much at

tention from officials as her incorrigibility.153 "I have an idea," one physician

concluded, that "she has been rather good looking and considered clever by her set and has managed to get off with a good many things."154 In light of

their apathetic stance toward black inmates' active involvement with other

women, administrators seemingly could not

ignore Moore's appearance

or behavior. Moore's actions even prevented her from corresponding with

her parents, as the superintendent wrote her mother that Moore was in

"punishment for improper actions with another girl."155 A black woman

whom even officials found physically attractive, she consistently pursued "undesirable" relationships with other, primarily white, inmates while at

Bedford as well as when she was paroled. After being discharged, Moore married but still maintained contact

with the same white inmate, Connie Carlson, with whom she had devel

oped an "undesirable friendship" in Bedford. In fact, after problems in

Moore's marriage, the two women began living together while Moore

attraction and the developing romantic relationships in women's prisons was more complex than Spaulding's observations suggested. For instance, one study completely disagreed with

Spaulding and in fact completely reversed her assessment by noting that white women were

not attracted to dark-complexioned black women but to those black women with a lighter hue.

Offering a distinct perspective, this study was still laden with racist stereotyping. It rejected

the premise that "some administrators of women's prisons [thought] it [was] because white

women associate masculine strength and virility with dark color"; instead, the study noted

that "usually it is not the very dark negro women who [were] sought after for such liaisons, but the lighter colored ones; and those who [were] most personable, the cleanest and the

best groomed" (ibid.). See also Joshua Fishman, Sex in Prison: Revealing Sex Conditions in

American Prisons (New York: National Library Press, 1934), 28. 152

Inmate #2503, Letter from Superintendent Helen Cobb to Department of Child

Welfare, Westchester County, 28 May 1918, BH. 153

Inmate #2503, Information Concerning Patient, 8 August 1917, BH. 154

Inmate #2503, Staff Meeting, 29 September 1917, BH. 155

Inmate #2503, Letter from Superintendent Helen Cobb to Inmate's Mother, 29

October 1918, BH.

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Black Women's Sexuality 453

was still pregnant with her estranged husband's child. Prison administra tors gained access to this information when an anonymous letter was

sent to a charitable agency noting that Moore had become a beggar and

that Carlson was "usually with her."156 While the interracial relationship caused problems at Bedford, such a friendship was also problematic once

both women were released. Unlike Mabel Hampton's attempts to keep her relationships private, Moore's case shows how her public display of

interracial romance prompted a neighbor to write a letter regarding the

possibility of "harmful intimacy" outside of prison. Moore's story did not end here. Five years later she was arrested for gun

possession and again sent to Bedford. Although Bedford officials refused to keep her, they did interview her. While working as a nightclub hostess,

Moore explained, she had continued to experience relationship problems, as she wanted to marry her boyfriend but had not divorced her first hus

band. Her second case file shows one documented instance of how women

charged with "harmful intimacy" struggled to maintain these relationships once released from Bedford. Moore and Carlson learned tough lessons

about the possibilities for their love. As evidenced by the fact that Moore

was reduced to asking for charity, neither woman could support the other

or Moore's infant. Yet it seems that they dealt with those outside forces

that challenged their intimate bond in distinct ways. Moore clearly estab

lished a life for herself in Harlem, and when rearrested she acknowledged her continued connection with Carlson by listing her, along with family members, as a friend who lived in Long Island.157

Mabel Hampton's experience also complicated officials' essentialized

portraits of homoerotic relationships. The story of her lesbianism, which was

never directly mentioned in her case file but revealed through her subsequent social activism, challenged Bedford administrators' constructed premise about "harmful intimacy" and highlights many of the institution's evalua

tive discrepancies. In Hampton's brief account of her Bedford experience she openly acknowledged the prevalence of as well as her participation in same-sex relationships (she did not indicate whether they were interracial or

intraracial).158 She remembered such Bedford relationships as being comfort

ing. After she and another prisoner revealed their attraction to one another,

Hampton noted that her fellow inmate "took me in her bed and held me

in her arms and I went to sleep."159 Although she desired women and dated

men before her imprisonment, her Bedford experience may have provided

156 Inmate #2503; see Letter from Church Mission of Help to Bedford, 9 June 1921, and

Letter from Church Mission of Help to Superintendent Baker, ca. June 1921, BH. 157

Inmate #4092, Family History, ca. 1926, BH. 158

Nestle, "Lesbians and Prostitutes," 169. Although from a later period, Billie Holiday noted the prevalence of same-sex relations when she was an inmate in the Federal Women's

Reformatory at Alderson, Virginia; see Billie Holiday with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues

(New York: Lancer Books, 1969), 132. 159

Nestle, A Fragile Union, 34-35.

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454 Cheryl D. Hicks

Hampton with an opportunity to embrace fully her same-sex desire. For

instance, another inmate claimed that she learned about sex from "Bedford

girls."160 Hampton's looks also failed to fit administrators' characterizations

of a black woman involved in "harmful intimacy." Instead of being portrayed as masculine, she was described in the most feminine manner by Bedford's

superintendent, Amos Baker, as a "small rather bright and good looking colored girl."161 Because of her dissembling, Hampton never received any conduct violations. Her family members, however, may have sensed that

she was not only being influenced by "bad company" but also expressing a

troubling affection for women. During her parole her aunt wrote to Bedford

officials, noting that Hampton was "very much infatuated with a middle-aged colored woman, with whom she became acquainted a short time before her

arrest, and whom she [her aunt] thought was not a good influence on the

girl."162 Hampton's case strongly suggests administrators' indifference to

black women's sexuality within the prison and underscores why some black

women might have chosen to hide their same-sex relationships.163 Like Hampton, other black women made attempts to maintain intimate

liaisons, especially during their parole. Ironically, Bedford sought to create a family-like atmosphere when young women were imprisoned but penal ized parolees for interacting too closely with one another once they left

the institution. Twenty-one-year-old Addie King reportedly experienced some difficulty keeping her distance from other Bedford women. Social

workers discovered that she lived with another black parolee as well as

a "masculine sort of woman known as 'Alec.'" King was also found in a

cooperative living arrangement, more than likely a reflection of her dire

financial situation. When social workers decided to rearrest her as a parole violator, they discovered not only that she lived intermittently with another

Bedford parolee and three other women but also that these women shared an

apartment with ten men.164

The nature of King's associations with the black women and men with

whom she lived is not clear, but there is evidence that she attempted to

maintain at least one interracial sexual relationship. When she worked as

a live-in domestic, King's different employers often complained that she

disregarded her curfew, sometimes arriving home late or never returning home until the next morning. In one instance King brought a white Bed

ford parolee to her employer's house and "tried to keep her there all night unknown to the family." When family members discovered her there, King's

160 Inmate #4092, History Blank, ca. May 1926, BH.

161 Inmate #3696, Admission Record, 9 July 1923, BH.

162 Inmate #3696, Letter from Amy M. Pr?vost to Dr. Amos T. Baker, 13 November

1924, BH. 163

Nestle, A Fragile Union, 34. For more of Hampton's observations regarding 1920s

Harlem see Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in

Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 76. 164

Inmate #4501, Parole Report, 1-2 March 1929, BH.

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Black Women's Sexuality 455

companion was asked to "get up and leave." The white employer believed

that the interracial friendship was inappropriate but became increasingly disturbed when evidence indicated that the two women's relationship was

not platonic. Reportedly, the employer contended that the affection between

the women was "disgusting."165

It would be impossible to gauge how many of these relationships con

tinued after a stint at Bedford, but evidence clearly shows that same-sex

desire was not simply a situational condition for white or black women

created by their imprisonment.166 Whether Bedford women gave up on

same-sex desire or became more adept at masking these relationships from

their employers and social workers, examples show that homoerotic rela

tionships existed outside the prison, however difficult. More importandy, these examples reflect how some women managed multiple relationships

with men and women. Not surprisingly, social workers noted, primarily

through violation reports, that black parolees were still in contact with

their mates just as they were during their imprisonment. Sometimes their

relationships were discovered when former inmates obtained permission to

visit Bedford. A confiscated letter in one black parolee's file, for instance,

explained how the former inmate "walked up to the Nursery" and picked

up the child of her white girlfriend, asking "her if she didn't know her own

daddy." Reportedly, "all the girls [in the nursery] laughed."167 While some

inmates began these relationships as a sign of temporary rebellion that re

jected the controlling influences of Bedford administrators, other inmates

saw these relationships as more than a crush or temporary desire.168 Most

importantly, these inmates strove to maintain relationships developed in

Bedford; moreover, these inmates, as Mabel Hampton's case indicates, may have also desired women before their imprisonment.

Conclusion

Mabel Hampton's experiences in early-twentieth-century New York as

understood through prison administrators' notations and her subsequent reflections upon her life provide a unique lens through which we might view

black women's sexuality. She was not a reformer advocating the "politics of

respectability," nor was she a blues singer expressing sexual desire through

performance. Rather, her life represents the complex ways that young women

acknowledged the relevance of proper decorum but also participated in the

growing consumer culture of commercial amusements. Women like her faced

enormous challenges as they sought to embrace their independence in a so

ciety that simultaneously offered carefree and uninhibited opportunities for

165 Inmate #4501, Parole Report, ca. 27 February 1929, BH.

166 See Kunzel, "Situating Sex."

167 Inmate #2380, Conduct Report and Confiscated Letter, n.d., BH.

168 See Alexander, The ?Girl Problem,1'96-97'.

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456 Cheryl D. Hicks

pleasure while at the same time feeling threatened by working-class women's

sexual behavior. As a result, relatives, community members, and law officers

monitored young women's sexual expression and generally supported the

rehabilitative objectives of state institutions like Bedford.

By studying the case files of black women like Hampton, we get a sense

of the language that ordinary black women used to express heterosexual

and same-sex desire. Acknowledging that such evidence has been mediated

through prison administrators' biases, we still can discern the stories that

black women chose to impart behind official responses to those narratives.

Although administrators' actions reflected prevailing racial and sexual stereo

types, the experiences that they documented offer complex perspectives on

how working-class and poor black women dealt with chastity, premarital sex,

rape, prostitution, and same-sex desire. Black women revealed not only

cer

tain aspects of their conduct but also how the concerns of relatives and other

community members regarding their behavior often conflicted with what they wanted for themselves. Frequently, their interactions with the community's

representatives were as heavily regulated as those with state representatives. Indeed, Mabel Hampton's reflections about Harlem highlighted how she

often dissembled in her neighborhood. As a black woman who desired women

she explained her caution about publicizing those relationships because "you had to be careful" and "you had [to have] fun behind closed doors."169

Although Hampton seems to have hidden her relationships with women

when she was incarcerated, other women, black and white, flaunted these

attachments. Bedford administrators claimed that the majority of their

disciplinary problems stemmed not simply from same-sex relationships but

rather from "harmful intimacy," or interracial sex. Their anxieties about such

relationships mirrored the concerns of a nation that generally discouraged interracial social and sexual relationships in law and practice. Attempting to

solve their dilemma by instituting racial segregation served only to temporar

ily assuage their racial anxieties more than it addressed the crux of the issue.

When some officials argued that young women brought same-sex romance

into the institution rather than those relationships being a consequence of

imprisonment, they illuminated the fact that sexual expression varied both

within and outside of Bedford. Emphasizing the latter point, this study offers a perspective from which to understand the complexity of black women's

experiences in early-twentieth-century New York by exploring how they ad

dressed the myriad pleasures and dangers of urban sexuality.

169 Hampton, interview with Nestle, 9.

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