"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

Thus the advice given to judges by the American Bar Association in 1936 that complaints of sexual abuse often stemmed from a girl's "erotic imagination" seems to have had a limited impact on incest trials--precisely the cases where one might assume that Freudian ideas would be most relevant. (33) Similarly, in describing the details of 159 cases of father-daughter incest, Kirson Weinberg never questioned whether incest victims were telling the truth. "In father-daughter incest," he writes, "the daughters were the most frequent informants. Many daughters told their mothers or siblings and some informed cousins, neighbors, or personal friends ... some relatives went with the daughters to the authorities; other relatives had the father arrested themselves. (34) That these "informants" might have been lying apparently never occurred to him, for in his ensuing discussion of these cases he never doubts the stories as they were related by the (usually adolescent) daughter.

Weinberg's assumptions about female incest victims are mirrored in criminal trial testimony from Chicago, Illinois father-daughter incest cases from 1944 through 1960. (35) Arguments were only transcribed for cases tried on appeal, hence full transcripts are only available for just over a dozen trials. However, appellate cases tended to be those for which the father's attorneys mounted a vigorous defense. The trial transcripts show that lawyers did everything in their power to discredit the moral character, believability, and sympathetic qualities of the daughter, a girl usually between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. While defense attorneys frequently attempted to establish that girls were lying, none relied on psychoanalytic ideas to suggest that such lies were based on Oedipal wishes. Instead, tactics for discrediting the daughter's testimony included insinuations that her memories had been "implanted" by a police matron, or that she wished to blame her father for her own sexual indiscretions. (36) For instance, in a case involving a fifteen year old girl in 1944, the defense questioned the girl's integrity by introducing evidence of promiscuity. The girl, Nora Thompson, as I shall call her, had been previously brought before the juvenile court for "running around with soldier boys" and spreading venereal disease, for which she was sent to a juvenile home. The defense also called Nora's high school teacher to testify, who claimed that she would "not believe Nora under oath," because, she said:

  she was very, very disobedient, she never wanted to comply with the
  rules; she was not what you might call a good citizen in the school at
  all; she was untruthful, and just would not obey no matter what you
  talked to her. (37)

After this testimony had been presented, the defense lawyer called the father's brother, sister and mother to the stand, all of whom had been living with Nora at the time of the incestuous attacks. Each testified that they had never heard Nora "holler" when she was alone with her father, that Mr. Thompson was a conscientious father and a good provider, that they did not personally believe that the attacks had taken place, and that Nora was impossible to handle. Despite such testimony, in this as in the other eleven appeals, the judge found the defendant guilty and sentenced him to a prison term of a minimum of three and a maximum of seven years (this sentence was on par with the national average). In all of the cases, the girl's sworn statement was the sole evidence upon which the father was convicted. Often, the daughter was testifying about events that happened over a year previous--testimony that was inadmissible in cases involving stranger rape--and her testimony frequently contradicted the testimony of her own mother.