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REVIEWS
| Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture. By Rachel Devlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 254 pp. $19.95 paper. $49.95 cloth).
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| From the perspective of today's relentless sexualization of children, especially girls, it is easy to forget that child sexual abuse has a remarkably short history as a social problem. When Florence Rush announced at a 1971 conference that "the family itself is an instrument of sexual and other forms of child abuse," even the experienced feminists in her audience were stunned. Incest was then considered, when it was considered at all, a very marginal phenomenon perpetrated by monstrous child molesters. Their predatory behavior was more likely to attract criminologists interested in a tiny minority of male offenders than scholars interested in the experiences of ordinary children, women, and families. |
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All of this changed quickly. Rush's book, The Best Kept Secret, was published in 1980, followed by Father-Daughter Incest by Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman in 1981. Together, these books revealed that incest was common rather than rare and publicized the fact that its victims, overwhelmingly female, numbered in the millions. In short order, child sexual abuse became a subject of vigorous social and medical research, a target of legislation and policy, and a focus of therapeutic interventions designed to heal a rapidly growing list of traumatic life events. |
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Rachel Devlin's smart book argues that "the father-adolescent daughter relationship was the apparatus through which the sexualization of the teenage girl was envisioned" (p. 173), a conclusion as disquieting as it is provocative. Many historians, Devlin points out, have described new autonomy among teens, girls included, after World War II, and have identified the origin of the "generation gap" with the appearance of a teenage market. Rather than holding consumption chiefly responsible for sexualizing younger girls in more ways during the past half century, Devlin suggests that we consider the transformation of fatherdaughter relationships during the 1940s and 1950s. Ongoing sexual exchanges between adolescent girls and their fathers were profoundly eroticized in postwar culture. Typically dismissed as fluff, these relationships helped to produce the deeply troubling wave of child sexual abuse by normalizing it. |
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