"Those girls seem to be faster than we are": Black Girls Negotiating and Policing Sexuality in 1930s Washington, D.C.

This presentation explores black girls’ conceptualizations and negotiations of sexual mores, and how they shaped girls’ interactions with each other in the 1930s. I argue that while black girls internalized the politics of respectability, a closer look at their ideas about appropriate sexual behavior reveals a much more complex negotiation of sexual mores. They then used these values to police, make judgements against, and interact with their peers. The girls at the center of this project were residents of Washington, D.C., came from various socio-economic backgrounds, and ranged in age from twelve through eighteen. They were interviewed between 1937 and 1939 as part of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s Negro Youth Study. The aim of this study was to understand what it meant to grow up black in Washington. Capturing the thoughts of black girls in the archive can seem elusive, but social scientific studies, such as the Negro Youth Study, are rich, and offer an entrance into thinking about their inner worlds.

Rather than looking at constructions of girlhood or girls as subjects of reform, I show how girls articulated their own views about sexuality. While historians of black girlhood have begun this work, there has been very little historical discussion about peer-to-peer interactions between African American girls. Much of the scholarship centers on how the politics of respectability and opinions about sexual behavior impacted young people’s heterosexual relationships and constructions of black girlhood. However, this presentation elucidates how ideas about appropriate sexual behavior shaped girls’ identities and friendships.