SEX FIENDS AND SCARED MOTHERS:

Two horrifying stories in California newspapers in June and July of 1955, stories that help us understand that, in the 1940s and 50s, “sex fiend” was the phrase most commonly used to describe what we might call a “sexual predator”, or even a “serial killer”.

As far as I can tell, having searched the archives of Central Valley newspapers, this is the only letter to the editor Norma Thomas ever wrote, evidence that she was powerfully agitated by what she was reading in the newspapers. But she was not the only one. Letters expressing worry about “sex fiends” were common that summer in newspapers across the country, proof of a wider moral panic kicked off by stories like the two above.

Curiosity…

I also tell my students that a historian must have the logic, tenacity and curiosity of a great detective, because historians, like detectives, try to answer questions about past events.

So, now, having read Norma Thomas’s letter to the editor and those two terrible stories, your curiosity should be engaged. Why? What was happening in America in the decade after the Second World War that brought on this moral panic about sexual predators? Were there actually more sex crimes in the 1950s than in previous decades?

One thing we can say, is that 1955 was a remarkably safe year in America, with a homicide rate more than half of what it had been just 20 years earlier.

Read the whole thing.