"Acting out the Oedipal wish": father-daughter incest and the sexuality of adolescent girls in the United States, 1941-1965

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2005 by Rachel Devlin

If, then, acts of incest and their interpretation have an important place in the history of gender and the family, we must ask, Which acts of incest? Motherson, sister-brother (which was very conspicuous in 17th century England, for instance), or father-daughter? (24) If father-daughter, how old were the daughters? Were they adults, adolescents, or children? (25) How did those incestuous acts and their interpretation function in relationship to other ideas about the family, gender, sexuality, and the social order? When we look closely at the available information about incest in the 1940s and 50s in the United States, we learn primarily about incest that occurred between fathers and adolescent daughters. Which is not to say that this was necessarily the most prevalent form of father-daughter incest, but simply that this form of incest was brought to light, and drew attention to itself, in ways that other forms of incest did not. Most importantly, rather than representing a wholesale threat to male dominance, postwar discussions of father-daughter incest actually helped to further entrench notions about the sexual power and developmental importance of fathers to daughters. Which is to say, the patriarchal power of fathers over daughters.

Judgements on Incest: Punishment and Frequency

The extent to which incest was statistically denied during the postwar period has been overstated. Kirson Weinburg's "one in a million" statistic was the official tally for prosecutions, not actual incidence. In stating that figure Weinberg himself noted that prosecutions could not possibly be used to measure how often incest actually occurred. (26) Indeed most postwar criminologists and sociologists, as well as some psychoanalysts, introduced their studies with an assertion, as did Kate Friedlander in her 1947 book The Psycho-Analytical Approach to Juvenile Delinquency, that "incestuous relationships between father and daughter ... are much more common than would appear from court statistics, for obvious reasons." (27) Those reasons, according to observers, were a daughter's fear of her abuser, the overwhelming power of fathers, and feelings of helplessness and shame.

Moreover, while prosecutions of incest cannot be used to assess how frequently incest actually occurred, it can be used as a gauge of how vigorously state authorities enforced laws against incest. According to Weinberg's statistics, legal concern remained fairly constant over the course of the twentieth century, with prosecutions remaining the same rather than declining after the widespread influence of psychoanalytic thought on professional social workers during the Progressive period, as one might expect. (28) In a study of sex offenders conducted in California in 1951, Karl Bowman found that the number of men found guilty for incest was low (1.7% of convicted sex-offenders) but held steady between 1945 and 1951. (29) The historian Philip Jenkins has found that incest accounted for 4% of the charges against sex offenders in New Jersey in 1949, and 3% of charges against sex offenders in Indiana between 1949 and 1956. (30) When charges of incest were brought in California, the conviction rate was significantly higher than for rape, or "lewd and lascivious conduct with a minor," and just as high as for sexual misdemeanors falling under "contributing to the delinquency of minors." (31) 75% of the incest cases that were brought before the court in California in 1951 ended in conviction. On the one hand, this high conviction rate reflects the fact that, unlike other "morals" cases, charges of incest could not be reduced to a lesser charge. On the other, the high conviction rate also reflects a tendency to believe rather than discredit the prosecuting witness. (32)