Introduction

[Page 1]

On the opening page of her controversial text, Judith Levine described a mounting panic about children’s sexuality announcing,

“In America today, it is nearlyimpossible to publish a book that says children and teenagers can have sexual pleasureand be safe too.” [*1]

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[*1] - Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002)

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The heated debate in which Levine found herself after the publication of Harmful to Minors supported her assertion. [...]

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This dissertation attempts to address how children’s safety came to be defined in terms of their removal from sexual subjectivity. This dissertation argues that 1970s social movement groups’ attention to and use of the figure of the child, particularly children’s sexuality, was central to their efforts to advance libratory frameworks.

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I trace the ways that three Boston groups

— [a] the BostonWomen’s Health Collective,
     [b] the Elizabeth Stone House, and
     [c] the North AmericanMan/Boy Love Association—

organized around issues of children’s sexuality.

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These seemingly altruistic child-focused agendas were used to benefit the adult members of each of these groups. In advancing these agendas, they participated in the creation of asymbolic child-victim whose invocation would become a means of foreclosing politica ldebate and establishing a cultural consensus of protection in the 1980s. In the end, the figure of the child that was so central to libratory movements of the 1970s was the verything that limited their vocabularies and contained their agendas by the 1980s.

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[Page 2]

Scholars have long accepted that the 1970s and 80s represented a time of political transformation for the American left as well as the broader political society.

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In the ‘70s America’s continued participation in Vietnam and Nixon’s resignation of
the presidency furthered public disillusionment with the government even as grass roots
feminist and civil rights groups’ messages began being reflected in wider cultural
circles. [..]

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By the 1980s, Reagan’s election signaled the growth of American conservatism and marked a broader turn away from the radical politics of the preceding decades. [..] The years between 1969 and 1990 also witnessed profound sexual reorganization in the U.S., which has not yet been adequately examined for the ways that its attention to children reshaped sexual discourse. Sociologist Joel Best noted,

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“Most historians agree that modernization has increased adults’ concern for children’s
well-being … However, during the 1970s and 1980s, child-victims began receiving a
larger share of public attention.” [*5]

[*5 - Joel Best, Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 5-6.

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The close of the sexual revolution, the ascendancy of its conservative backlash, and academic and political culture wars all centrally positioned sexuality. Indeed, the social and political upheaval that characterized the period may account for the increased focus on sexuality within popular discourse. As feminist scholar Gayle Rubin noted,

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“Disputes over sexual behavior often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity.” [*6]

[*6 - Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” in Carole S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Sexuality (1984) reprinted in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, David M. Halperin eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993), 4.

Also at < https://www.ipce.info/library_3/files/rubin/rubin_frame.htm >

[Page 3]

Issues of children’s sexuality in this period came to dominate national and local media, as sexuality became the battleground on which culture wars were waged within grass-roots political organizations as well as the academy. Defending against an increasingly conservative political regime and navigating a fractured political landscape, varied leftist groups attempted to advance their own frameworks of sexual freedom.

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I challenge established narratives about both the waning of the New Left and the rise of the New Right advanced by Ruth Rosen, Gregory Schneider, Nigel Young, and others who oppose the factioning and discontinuity on the left with the establishment of a coalition between social and economic conservatives on the right. [... ...]

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Instead, I argue that attention to children and youth was at the heart of the collapse of leftist sexual politics. I contend that groups on the left were unable to advance cohesive agendas when faced with applying their libratory frameworks to children. The figure of the child became central to group efforts to perform radicalism, even as its deployment was increasingly linked to more conservative protectionist political paradigms.

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[Page 4]

At the heart of the project is my analysis of the activists and social movement groups whose strategic maneuverings centered the child within anti-violence rhetoric and libratory frameworks. A range of social movement organizations from feminist groups like

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[a] The Boston Women’s Health Collective and

[b] The Elizabeth Stone House to
[c] radical queer groups like the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA)

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focused on issues of children’s sexuality as part of broader contests over the nature of violence and the meaning of liberation. Activists’ skirmishes over a variety of sexual issues including pornography, inter-generational sex, and mental health diagnostic criteria reshaped the political landscape by redefining radicalism and redrawing the boundaries of the left.

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[a]

Inspired in part by a feminist ethos that encouraged women to claim ownership of their own bodies, the Boston Women’s Health Collective applied the feminist doctrine, “the personal is political,” to women’s health care, arguing that when a woman learned about her own body, it was a political act that both empowered the woman and challenged the patriarchal system of medical experts. [..]

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The group’s first major publication, Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), was credited with starting a global women’s health movement, and the group itself was the on vanguard of patients’ rights advocacy. [..] Though their primary educational work was directed at women, the Collective nevertheless participated in debates about children with their endorsement of alternative birthing and child-care techniques as well as their belief in early and comprehensive sexual education.

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[Page5]

Indeed, their attention to sexuality and to children, even more than their challenges to the medical establishment, was considered by contemporaries on both sides of the political spectrum to be among their most radical positions. This radical attention to children was couched within a maternalist framework in which empowered mothers could liberate themselves and their children from a culture of repression.

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[b]

Similarly invested in patients’ rights, women’s health care, and motherhood, the Elizabeth Stone House was another feminist health organization in Boston. The product of a 1973 conference on women and madness, the Stone House opened in 1974 to provide women with an alternative to state institutionalization. [..]

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The only residential psychiatric facility that allowed women to maintain physical custody of their children, the Stone House reframed women’s “madness” as a rational though distressed response to the pressures of living in a violently sexist society. That it did so while maintaining mothers’ custodial rights was viewed by staffers as a particularly radical act.

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Since many Stone House clients were victims of sexual violence, the organization had a particular stake in and approach to sexual politics that was reflected in many of its programs and policies. Because it housed the children of women facing emotional distress, the Stone House developed protocols for everything from educational play to guidelines for and restrictions on dating for older children. In as much as the Stone House rejected psychiatric diagnostic criteria, established alternative frameworks for care, and linked women’s mental distress to broader issues of poverty and violence, it situated itself within several leftist struggles.

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[Page 6]

[c]

In opposition to the maternalist frameworks advanced by the Boston Women’s Health Collective and the Elizabeth Stone House, the North American Man/Boy Love
Association (NAMBLA) challenged ownership models that gave parents absolute authority over their children, claiming that American parents were unable to provide for the social and sexual needs of their (boy) children.1[..]

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Positioning themselves as part of a gay liberation movement, NAMBLA’s 1978 inaugural conference identified the platform of the group as bringing an end to the repression of consensual sexual relationships, particularly those between adult men and minor-aged boys.

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Because of the intensity of political opposition it faced as well as its virtual inability to create successful coalitions with other groups on the left, NAMBLA founders argued that their group represented the most radical position in sexual liberation.

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Because of their proximity to each other and their particular aims, these three groups provide ideal case studies in a project that seeks to reveal the centrality of the child both to activism on the left and to the shrinking possibilities of that activism.

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Founded in Boston in the 1970s each was equally invested in local and national politics. In their efforts to effect cultural change, members of the groups linked their fate with that of the child.

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- [a] For the Boston Women’s Health Collective, this translated into advancing specific parenting and educational models.

- [b] For the Stone House it meant recognizing both the possibilities and the limitations of motherhood

-  [c] while attempting to change a culture that was hostile to women and children.
[Page 7]
NAMBLA members sought to free gay boys from the repression that constrained their abilities to act on their sexual desires.

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In their efforts to advance social change, these groups rallied around an imperiled child, one that was victimized by sexual violence, poverty, and repression.

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Indeed, I contend that these groups used the figure of the child to advance agendas from
which members would benefit.

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Together these three groups, each with a different understanding of radicalism and its own contribution to leftist politics, offer a window into the multiple ways that the tenets of the sexual revolution were applied to children and the extent to which contests over the sexuality of children forged or broke alliances in activist politics.

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This study analyzes the ways that the politics of the left in the 1970s and ‘80s were shaped by debates over children’s sexuality. The very idea that children have sexuality is politically contentious, and the frequency with which politicians, reformers and other activists rally around issues of child sexuality suggests that the stakes of the debate are particularly high. [..]

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Political discourse that seeks to address children’s sexuality has much work to do:

- it must clearly define the figure of the child;

- it must successfully engage with the emotional intensity attached to that figure; and

- it must identify the figure as innocent or incorrigible and in so doing establish a need to protect children from the dangers posed by society or protect society from the dangers posed by unchecked youth.

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[Page 8]

Each of the movements examined in this study performs this work.

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Moreover, their use of the child to advance their own libratory agendas highlights the lasting political significance connected to the figure as well as the ways that it was used to define the politics of the left throughout the 1970s.

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The figure of the child that drew the attention of politicians and reformers in the 1970s and 80s was the focus of American labor, educational and moral reformers throughout the century. These activists, along with medical, developmental and psychological experts, defined the child with increasing numbers of attributes and vulnerabilities.

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- Some argued for an acknowledgement of sexuality in infants and children, while

- others demanded recognition of the particular emotional and psychological needs of children, and

- still others advanced sweeping educational reforms to address the physical, intellectual and moral character of children. [..]

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In each of these cases, the figure of the child was expanded to include sexuality, rationality, sensibility and the vulnerabilities associated with their mishandling.

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Not surprisingly, given its place in the politics of reform, the figure of the child was the object of emotional intensity in the American psyche. The developments of the modern world at the turn of the century and the changing political landscape near century’s end both contributed to transforming cultural attitudes about children.

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As children’s labor was regulated, as their education was expanded, and as young people of greater ages were (re)categorized as “children,” both personal and public perceptions of the child were sites of contest.
[Page 9]
Indeed, Viviana Zelizer argued that the emotional attachment to children increased as their economic value to the family declined. [..]

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Invested with greater emotional intensity, the figure of the child was the object of an
increasing amount of public reform measures.

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So-called “youth crises” erupted throughout the century, leading politicians and reformers to grapple with innocent and vulnerable children on the one hand and incorrigible delinquents on the other.

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To address the perceived causes of child corruption, disruptive moral influences like comic books, pornography and rock/rap music had to be contained, while education and family structure were constantly scrutinized for deficiencies. [..]

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At the same time, youth participation in activist politics from newspaper boys’ agitation in the 30s to adolescent anti-war protesters in the 60s and 70s also raised questions about vulnerability and delinquency.

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To the extent that young dissidents were exploited, they required protection and intervention. However, when their dissident practices became disruptive, children and youth were transformed from a vulnerable population into a threatening one. That is, as young people began to agitate on their own behalf rather than being passive recipients of adult reform movements, the “deserving vs. delinquent” binary was further complicated.

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At times when the broader atmosphere was suspicious of dissident politics, the conundrum posed by youth activism became a serious political issue that invigorated two kinds of  political approaches from adults: the first a politics of protection, the other a politics marked by fear of disruption.

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[Page 10]

Though typically associated with conservative movements, these protectionist and fearful political positions were advanced by groups on the left when they dealt with children. Paradoxically, leftist groups often adopted several of the models of children advanced by their right-wing contemporaries. On the right, groups like the Moral Majority focused on protecting children, couching their agenda not only in terms of child vulnerability but also in terms of the inherent innocence of children.

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At the same time, activists like Anita Bryant frequently cited how dangerous “corrupted” youth were. [..] Leftist critiques of these right-wing political approaches often claimed that innocence was most frequently applied to affluent, white children while children of color and those living in poverty were perceived as dangerous. [*17]

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[* 17 - It should also be noted that within this framework the “dangerous” populations required higher levels of surveillance and intervention to contain the threat they posed to the broader society and to encourage them to conform to the standards set by affluent whites.]

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Despite some rhetorical overlap with right-wing models of the child, the groups examined in this dissertation were part of a broader leftist investment in conservative models of
childhood innocence and protection.

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To say that the figure of the child was a rhetorical tool that found its way into so much political organizing in the twentieth century is not to ignore the realities of (sexual) exploitation and erasure that faced American children. Rather, it is to acknowledge the ways that political discourses of children’s sexuality participated in and indeed sometimes produced that exploitation and erasure.

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[Page 11]

Foregrounding children’s sexual victimization established a paradigm in which children’s sexual subjectivity was virtually unthinkable, just as fighting against children’s sexual repression endorsed ideas of sexual precocity that made allegations of abuse less credible. [*18]

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[* 18 - Steven Angelides, “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality,” in GLQ 10:2, 141-177.]

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For example, when they replaced the precocious Lolita nymphet with an exploited and abused incest survivor, feminists merely substituted one paradigm with another. The “child-victim” around which they rallied assumed great cultural purchase and was codified in several new laws including the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974. [..]

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Through an investigation of the groups that advanced these positions, this study exposes the ways that debates about child sexuality were used to shape the project of American political dissent.

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This, then, is a study of dissident politics. Focusing on radical movements for liberation and their organizing around issues of children’s sexuality, I unpack the ways that debates about children, sex and violence within leftist politics in the 1970s contributed to the narrowing of leftist politics in the 1980s.

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It is the central claim of this dissertation that the child came to mark the limits of liberation. That is, despite their rhetorical reliance on the figure of the child, libratory movements in the United States were unable to apply their principles across boundaries of age. As they advanced different models of liberation, social movement groups fought to (re)define the child in terms of victimization, both active and repressive. These efforts often
relied upon anti-violence rhetoric that expanded the cultural meaning of violence.

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Through their approaches to liberation, each of the groups that I investigate coalesced around a rejection of the violence that was visited upon it and the figure of the child it deployed.
[Page 12]
The role of child protector thus became central to the libratory agendas of these social movement groups.

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Members of these groups were not alone in centering issues of children’s sexuality within popular and political culture. Indeed, beginning in the 1960s when several states adopted lower age of consent laws and continuing through the much publicized sexual abuse trials of the 1980s, children’s sexuality captured popular imagination and shaped political discourse. [..]

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On the one hand, the controversy and publicity that surrounded the McMartin pre-school trial on the west coast, allegations of ritualistic satanic sexual abuse in Jordan, Minnesota and the prosecution of a father and son for pedophilia in Philadelphia suggests that cities and towns across the United States were equally subject to the hysteria of child sex scandals. [*21]

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[* 21 - Phillip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Joel Best, Threatened Children (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).]

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At the same time, however, the median age of models dropped and beauty pageants for younger children expanded. Television, film, radio and fiction writing reflected this cultural
ambivalence about the role of the child in a modern world. [..]

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[Page 13]

The body of this project uses a local community — Boston — to elaborate on this broader cultural preoccupation with children’s sexuality. Boston has functioned as a prominent site in public discussion of children’s sexual exploitation and liberation. For the years under examination, Boston’s children consistently receive national attention because of

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- the implementation of school busing,

- the sexual misconduct of members of the Boston Catholic archdiocese,

- the publishing of the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves, and

- the emergence of the North American Man/Boy Love Association in response to the prosecution of an alleged pedophile ring.

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My own interest grew not only from these defining features of the city, but also from my belief that a close study of a particular region would offer historicized and contextual grounding for an object of inquiry — children’s sexuality — that is most often embedded in abstract theoretical discussion.

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Cultural understandings of and scholarship about sexuality have long been inextricably linked to shifting concepts of childhood (and age in general) in the United States. Despite this, historians have been reluctant to examine these linkages. This avoidance is particularly troubling given that debates about children are situated at the center of popular contests over the meaning and regulation of sexuality and sexual behavior. By historicizing these issues, I shed light on processes usually clouded by scandal —

- the performance of radicalism,

- the narrowing of political participation, and

- the use of the child to achieve these ends.

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[Page 14]

Historians have written about the emergence of childhood as a developmental or chronological category, about its subsequent conflation with innocence, and its eventual location in the center of a realm of protection. As an ideological construct, childhood has been examined for the ways it interacts with labor, economic and gender systems, while the child himself has been identified as a site of cultural reproduction. [... ...]

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Despite this scholarly attention to children and childhood, and despite recent scandals in the Catholic Church and a proliferation of high-profile kidnapping/sexual assault cases that have re-centered debates about children and sex, few have undertaken an historical analysis of children’s sexuality and the problems and possibilities its recognition inspires.

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Histories of childhood were originally pursued as part of studying families. The child emerged as an independent object of study, and childhood itself was scrutinized when historians investigated the changing experiences of children and shifting attitudes directed towards them.

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In the 1960s, when new social history turned scholarly attention to the “private side” of life, histories of childhood changed from earlier accounts that focused on labor to include

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- the child’s role in the family structure,

- the cultural and emotional meaning attached to children, and

- the expansion of developmental categories to define as children people of greater ages. [..]

Even the study of childlessness became an opportunity to investigate the ways that having children aided the performance of mature adulthood. [..]

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[Page 15]

Most recently, studies of childhood have contended with the political origins and significance of changing models of childhood.

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Like the history of childhood, the history of sexuality developed as a field interested in “private life” and emerging from older studies of family. With its interest in courtship and reproduction, the history of sexuality had to contend with age from its inception. Despite this, attention to children’s sexual subjectivity remains limited. [..]

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Instead, historians of sexuality moved from studying ideologies propagated by elites to investigating the behaviors practiced by real people. [..] Just as the history of childhood examined the emergence of new developmental categories like adolescence, the history of sexuality explored the development of sexual identity categories like homosexual and heterosexual.

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For historians of sexuality, however, this attention led to studies of resistance and political activism. [..]

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Recent scholarship in the history of sexuality borrows from queer and cultural studies to investigate “normal” and “natural” meanings attached to sexual behavior. Moreover, scholars have understood these questions as part of broader structural apparatuses like law, policy and medicine.

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[Page 16]

Building on this scholarship, my project situates children and sexuality at the heart of public controversy and political change. At the same time, however, my project breaks with existing scholarship in several important ways. Since it is not, strictly speaking, a history of childhood, this dissertation does not concern itself with detailing the lived realities of American children.

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Instead, I use children’s sexuality as a point of entry to understand the evolution of national and political identities and to explain the relationships between violence and liberation, and between radicalism and deviance.

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Intervening in the historiography of the left, I put histories of sexuality, childhood, and social movements into conversation with each other and with cultural studies discourse analyses. While historians have undertaken discursive analysis of social movements, most have placed the rhetoric of children’s sexuality on the periphery, failing to explore the ways that it was deployed to expand discourses of violence while contracting discourses of liberation. Rather than focus on a single movement, this project demonstrates that the child repeatedly emerged as a political tool in leftist activism and argues it shaped the boundaries of liberation and the content of radicalism.

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Each of the groups that I examine claimed membership in a radical leftist political community, however, the content of radicalism from its political extremism to its cultural performance, was contested by these groups.

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The women of the Elizabeth Stone House eschewed not only NAMBLA members’ political agenda but also the validity of their claims to be brothers in a leftists struggle. For their part, the men of the North American Man/Boy Love Association were reluctant to ally themselves with feminists whose politics they saw as almost universally conservative and narrow.

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[Page 17]

Nevertheless, the label “radical” was as central to each group’s political identity as the figure of the child was to its programmatic reforms. In my analysis of their rhetoric and activities I pay particular attention to their understandings of and approaches to radicalism.

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At the same time, I also foreground what I call the pathologization of radical protest: the paradigm that defines dissent as pathology. The title Deviants and Dissidents acknowledges the import of this process on the perception and history of dissident activists in general and those engaged in activism around children and sexuality in particular.

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Neither “violence” nor “child,” though used repeatedly, can easily be defined here. In fact, this study will reveal the contests that erupted over the definitions of those two terms. The actors examined herein sought to define violence so that they could be perceived as persecuted radicals, and to define the child in ways that would further that perception and curtail opposition to their political agenda.

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My examination of these debates draws heavily from the scholarship in queer studies which critiques stable binaries — male and female, gay and straight — and allows me to challenge
naturalized assumptions about the distinction between child and adult. [..]

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With this project, I establish the emergence of the modern child whose modernity is linked not only to its ability to symbolize progressive nationalism but also, and importantly, to its existence as a sexualized being.

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Broadly exploitable, this new modern child was seized upon by feminists, boy-lovers, anti-pornography activists, and the newly consolidated moral majority.
[Page 18]
Through their attention to children’s sexuality, each of these groups grappled with expanding public perceptions of what constituted violence while advancing distinctive libratory frameworks.

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My analysis of these competing frameworks reveals the ways in which the child came to structure political discourse by marking the limits of liberation. Thus, my dissertation reveals the shrinking of progressive political possibilities and the emergence of a consolidated conservative political agenda. I use the child to expose both the legacy of progressivism and the rise of conservatism, arguing that violence compelled libratory activist groups to act while the figure of the child marked the boundaries of their actions.

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The following chapters spotlight my interest in understanding how discursive contests over children’s sexuality came to define the contours of radical leftist political activism. In each chapter I examine the language and actions of particular groups to expose the ways that the child functioned to authorize libratory agendas and to legitimize claims to radicalism.

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Organized chronologically the first three chapters introduce the modern child and the groups whose activities revolved around it. The final chapter considers the ways in which anti-violence rhetoric was used to shape debates about children and liberation.

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Taken together, these chapters demonstrate that debates about children’s sexuality are central to an historical understanding of post-WWII feminism, domestic dissent, and American attitudes about violence. My examination of social movement organizations in the 1970s and ‘80s exposes the ways that ideas about children’s sexuality shaped local politics by redefining what constituted violence and advancing new ideas for liberation from it.

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[Page 23]

This dissertation’s investigation of the dissonance between the rhetoric of innocence surrounding childhood and attempts to acknowledge children as sexual beings locates the child at the center of a web of censorship, psychology, and (mis)education. These tensions refigure cultural mandates to protect children by differentiating between

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- sexual innocence, which is celebrated, and

- sexual ignorance, which increases vulnerability and acts as a dangerous impediment to “appropriate” development.

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Thus the child exists as a sexed, if not wholly sexual, being; its erotic identity emerging slowly in response to carefully monitored stimuli, safeguarded from potential perversion.

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However, it is the space where sexuality in the child and the adult meet, the moment (or even the possibility) of a sexual encounter between the two, that is the locus of cultural anxiety. Adult-child sexual relationships, the eroticization of children for adults’ sexual or consumer gratification, and the recognition of children’s own sexual appetites crystallize American uneasiness with sexual maturation, desire, and the fragility of their own constructions of purity and innocence.

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This project focuses specifically on the ways that children’s sexuality was defined in relation to purity, sexual orientation, agency and victimization. By exploring the discursive and political battles waged by a varied cast of political actors in Boston, my research offers an analysis of the child’s relationship to sexual discourse is centered within political debates and social movements.

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This is a study of the ways in which varied activist communities attempted to advance frameworks of sexual freedom while navigating the fractured landscape of the New Left and an increasingly conservative political regime in the 1970s and 80s.