Women's Barracks and 1950s Prudes
Continuing my work on post-WWII obscenity law, today I get to report having found something I’ve long sought but was losing hope of: record of the prosecution of Women’s Barracks. The post war era saw a resurgence of obscenity charges - against books, comics, magazines, film, and even letters through the post - for a few reasons. Partly it was embedded in broader gender panic as wars dislocate established gender, family, and race dynamics. Obscenity was part of reasserting these disrupted hierarchies. Partly it was driven by Cold War ideology that saw Communism and the Soviet Union behind every bush. These folks presented “dirty” books as a plot to destroy the moral foundations of America. Then there was the change in the market with the emergence of paperback “pocket” books, or mass market paperbacks as we call them. As I discussed in a post about Detroit censorship, charges rarely involved hardcover books because the authorities treated this as involving the better sort of society; paperbacks, however, were cheap and available to the unwashed masses who needed protection from smut. All of this found a target in the new version of an old genre: pulp novels.
Women’s Barracks is generally considered the first of a subset of this genre, lesbian pulp. Lesbian pulp fiction was enormously popular through the 1960s with most of it, like “lesbian porn" of today, being produced by and for straight men. Women’s Barracks, however, was not all that erotic by anyone’s standards. Tereska Torrès wrote it based on her experiences of serving in the Free French Forces in London. It depicted the experiences of five women and at least two had lesbian experiences. Torrès disliked that it was described as lesbian pulp fiction as she didn’t see it as particularly lesbian or erotic, it was just a reporting of her experiences and what she saw. Interestingly, the publisher demanded that the narrator (representing Torrès) include moral judgments about the women in the books. The the book sold huge becoming a best seller (depending on reports perhaps the first original novel in paperback to make that distinction). The popularity of this and other paperback books triggered a congressional investigation, the Gathings Committee, into “pornographic literature.” Though the book included sexual escapades beyond the lesbian encounters, it was the lesbian encounters that drew most of the attention. Below is part the report used in the Gathings Committee investigation on the dangers of Women’s Barracks. It lists “Lesbianism” as the sole reason for it being obscene. For good measure I threw in the first excerpt pointed to as evidence of this obscenity.
Reva Beck Bosone papers, MS 0127, Box 7. Special Collections and Archives. University of Utah, J. Willard Marriott. Salt Lake City, Utah.
Obscenity law, however, is primarily a state affair in the U.S. and action depended on local governments. I’ve known for a while that Women’s Barracks was the basis of a prosecution in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953 but I could find little in the way of records. Happily, in a recent trip to the Twin Cities I have finally located a copy (though sadly edited) of the opinion holding Women’s Barracks to be protected speech and not obscene. I’ve been searching for this opinion for more than three years. It’s a nice example of this odd period between World War II, when obscenity prosecutions were reinvigorated, and 1957 when the Supreme Court made obscenity an issue of federal free speech law.
Harry Fredkove operated Courtesy News Co. in St. Paul for at least 20 years. While the local news doesn’t suggest he was a target before, in 1946 he did seemingly help get God’s Little Acre banned by St. Paul police when he reported a customer complaint to them. But the press doesn’t indicate a history of scandalous material for sale until he was charged with selling obscene materials after Kenneth Bayliss bought a copy of Women’s Barracks. One of the local papers described Bayliss as a “crusader against … indecent publications” and president of the National Council for Youth, likely some kind of antismut group. These groups often sent members to visit various newsstands and stores to monitor the magazines, comic books, and paperback books for sale. They typically demanded the removal of anything they didn’t like and, if the seller didn’t give in, would go to police as well as potentially organizing some kind of boycott.
Sadly the legal records likely do not exist anymore but the gist of things is that Fedkove’s attorney argued that Women’s Barracks was not legally obscene and, thus, no charges would rest upon it. Fredkove was supported in this by the new Minnesota branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. Judge James Otis agreed. Obscenity law was a mess at the time, though this is always true. In most cases the issue simply came down to how the judge felt about the book, magazine, picture, or whatever in question. If the judge thought the book was ok and not too shocking, it could be sold. This hopelessly subjective test meant that no one could predict what would be obscene.
Otis clearly sided with a rising generation of judges critical of Victorian era stodgy obscenity law. He invoked two key trial court decisions, Commonwealth v. Gordon (1949) and Bantam Books v. Melko (1953), to define a different vision of obscenity than the prosecutor demanded. The prosecution rested upon only “eight or nine specific passages” and “the law everywhere” is to consider the book as a whole. Obscenity was framed as a relational and evolving concept, one that varies “both as to time and space” meaning what was obscene in 1868 might not be obscene in 1953. The test Otis adopted was “does the publication, taken as a whole, have a libidinous effect” on an average person.
Otis did not see Women’s Barracks as an amazing work of literature: “The book … may not be a great masterpiece of literature, and the likelihood of this becoming a classic is certainly slight” but “Whether the book is well written or enduring is not for this Court to determine. It is enough that it appears to be a sincere effort to describe a period of recent history.” Yes, the book has sexual episodes but it did “not appear to dwell on the subject with more detail than the situation requires, and most of the scenes are handled with considerable restraint.” If this seems like a weird thing for a judge to be concerned with today, all I can say is this is the norm of obscenity at the time: you had to convince the judge that whatever immorality you presented was reasonable to the context of the story. A Canadian judge vehemently disagreed and held Women’s Barracks obscene around the same time (though under weaker protections for free speech). Mary Louise Adams has a good article covering this prosecution for folks with JSTOR access.
However, the book was not targeted because of sex in the abstract but for its depiction of lesbianism specifically. To Otis depicting lesbians was fine because “There is no suggestion that any of the Lesbian relationships had any sustained attraction or resulted in anything but disillusionment and revulsion.” This was a reality of lesbian pulp fiction as it developed into a well-selling field in the 1950s and ‘60s. Publishers came to like lesbian stories because they sold well to straight men but they also had to balance the risk of legal prosecutions. These publishers often ordered the writers to end the book in one of two ways: either the lesbian repented and went back to her healthy, straight life, or she died and thus there was a moral judgment to the book. Doing this was seen as necessary to defeat arguments that lesbian pulps were designed to lure girls into depravity. Torrès was not required to go this far but as noted she reported having to add moral disapproval to the narrative. This helped save the book from conviction in St. Paul; Otis’s opinion turned on the very fact that the lesbianism was not sustained, that it was fleeting and reviled. Had the book suggested that lesbians could have happy, long term relationships things might have turned out different for Harry Fredkove.
It is this aspect that drew my interest in this obscure case. The lesbian pulp genre was just igniting and the place of Women’s Barracks as a bestseller in driving this genre is important. Yes most of the consumers were straight men looking for a “one handed read.” However, it is also common to read accounts of queer women who grew up at this time first finding themselves in these books, seeing that their existence might have some validity and hope in them. (And there were a small number, some written by queer women, that managed to subvert the industry requirements and present more honest portrayals of lesbians). This, of course, was the fear of censors because the state should ensure that only straight people exist, any deviance must be punished and silenced. Otis’s opinion rejected this but only to the extent that the book in question included sufficient warnings about the dangers of lesbianism itself. Sadly that was as much freedom as queer people in the early 1950s could hope for.
City of St. Paul v. Fredkove, November 1953. Minnesota Civil Liberties Union Records, Box 12. Minnesota Historical Society.
Women’s Barracks is available from The Feminist Press today.
