"A New Generation of Women": Progressive Psychiatrists and the Hypersexual Female

In the early years of the twentieth century, a number of prominent American psychiatrists identified the hypersexual female, the willfully passionate woman who could not control her desires for sexual pleasure, as an issue of pressing medical concern. Psychiatrists diagnosed whose sexuality they deemed abnormally aggressive as these women, they explained, suffered from an inborn condition for which there was no remedy save institutionalization. Borrowing the term psychopathic from the nosologies of their German counterparts, who began using it in the late nineteenth century to classify male deviants (including vagabonds, criminals, anarchists, revolutionaries, reformers), American psychiatrists employed it to account for what many agreed was the problem of women's sexual excess. Psychiatrists early identified prostitutes female juvenile delinquents, most of whom had been charged with immoral behavior, as psychopaths; soon, a variety of other young whose sexuality violated medical social conceptions of proper female deportment swelled their ranks. New women of the working class, these hypersexual psychopaths sought a sexual freedom unknown to their mothers. A new generation of has arrived, proclaimed one of them, Ethel Hancock, a twenty-one-year-old waitress, and the wrong of Grandma's day is the right of today.' Confronted by a revolution in sexual mores among workingclass youth, psychiatrists, like other social investigatorssociologists, social workers, criminologists -turned to the problem of female immorality. Psychiatrists, like many others, ascribed the lax sexual etiquette of the time to the deterioration of women's