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The Girl Problem
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The Girl Problem: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900-1930. Chapter 1. Going around with a bad crowd of Girls Nellie Roberts sent to the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills in mid-1917, after a Port Jervis magistrate concluded that she was a menace to the community. Sixteen-year-old. Nellie, the daughter of an illiterate laborer, first captured the attention of the Police in Port Jervis, which was a city of smoke-filled railroad yards and glass factories. The girls then started to Hitchhike in late 1916. Nellie was convicted of “traveling about the city entering saloons and commuting acts of prostitution” and received at standard three-year sentence to Bedford Hills. The young inmates at Bedford Hills and Albion between 1900 and 1930 in struggling families that struggled to maintain Social respectability. Fathers of the one hundred delinquents had a variety of occupations, but few held hobs that conferred security, status, or more than a modest income. Mothers of the many delinquent young women also worked for wages. Among the one hundred Bedford and Albion women also worked for wages. Only 27 inmates hat working mothers, a rate well above national rates of employment for married women from 1900 to 1920. Most Delinquent women abandoned school at an early age, and took domestic, factory, or witnessing jobs or helping with housework and childcare to relieve the burdens of their hard-pressed families. Nellie Roberts quit school when she was fifteen years old. She only completed 6 grades, and after that she worked four low-paying domestic factory jobs before she was arrested. The rebellious behavior lf these three young women, so much like those of many others, gained definition of efficacy from a highly specific cultural context. The girls would use the streets of the city as well as the technological and commercial inventions of an urban industrial society to acquire the autonomy they desired. They wanted a romantic and erotic identity, and identity reified by the movies, songs, fashions, and dance steps of urban America.
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Paper Information
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Title: The Girl Problem
Words: 1632
Rating: None
Pages: 6.5
submitted by: Mysterio
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