‘Storm and Stress’: Richard Devane, Adolescent Psychology and the Politics of Protective Legislation 1922–1935

Abstract

Between 1922 and 1935 successive Irish governments came under pressure from an alliance of feminist, religious and social work organizations to introduce legislation that would give greater protection to children, girls and women from sexual exploitation.1 Throughout this chapter, these organizations and the individuals who supported them are referred to as the ‘protectionist’ or ‘social work’ lobby. Their campaign had its origins in nineteenth-century efforts to address the sexual double standard — the ethical system which condemned female lapses from chastity as unforgiveable while simultaneously regarding male incontinence as being natural and venial.2 The campaign reflected connected discourses around unmarried motherhood and prostitution. To synopsize crudely, while campaigners had little sympathy with older women who were deemed to have embraced a life of immorality — the mothers of more than one illegitimate child, married women who became pregnant by men other than their husbands, and women who were sometimes called ‘deliberate prostitutes’ — they sought to establish the fundamental innocence, victimhood and amenability to moral reclamation of the sexually-compromised adolescent. Their preferred narrative was one of seduction and betrayal, in which a girl, often a domestic servant, was impregnated by an older and more powerful man, perhaps her employer. Ostracized by society and unable to support herself or her child, she drifted into prostitution.