01.12.2025 – Naama Maor

Auerbach Lecture | 01.12.2025 | 18 Uhr

Naama Maor (Geschichte, Tel Aviv): “Please, Judge, don't think that I am bad.” Sex, Intimacy, and the Legal Profession in the 1920s United States

Programm

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Abstract

In the mid-1920s, American youth found an unusual source for advice on sexuality and intimacy. He was not a teacher, religious leader or a family member but one of the nation’s leading juvenile court judges, Ben Lindsey. Empowered by the judge’s publications on “The Revolt of Modern Youth,” hundreds of young people reached out to him for information, guidance, and comfort. Drawing on correspondence between Lindsey and his young readers, this lecture examines their constructed narratives of struggles with desire, courtship, marriage, pregnancy, and contraception. Their letters reveal a generation’s effort to make sense of changing sexual mores and its claim to information and sex education. This research asks what made advice seekers pen intimate letters to Lindsey about their fears and troubles; how they came to think of their relationship with the judge; and what this epistolary evidence reveals about the different legal spaces judges like Lindsey had occupied.