In turn-of-the-twentieth-century America, a husband's desertion or failure to provide for his wife and children became problematized as a cause of poverty and delinquency. Every state enacted a law which punished a male householder who failed to support his family. This article scrutinizes how the workingmen responded to the legal treatment, and examines the consequences of the criminalization of male desertion or non-support, based on the court records in San Diego, California during the 1910s and early 1920s.
The legal treatment of male desertion or non-support was based on the assumption that the man failed to fulfill his economic responsibilities toward the family due to his moral weaknesses, manifested in the form of drunkenness, gambling and sexual immorality. After placing him on probation, judges, probation officers and social workers intervened in the private sphere of the defendant and monitored his ways of spending, leisure activities and family relationships. The defendant was forced to pay a certain amount of money to his family periodically and to refrain from activities which social reformers deemed immoral. However, these disciplinary measures failed to consider economic difficulties with which the workingmen were frequently faced, such as unemployment, low wages, industrial accidents and epidemics. Thus, the legal treatment tended to stigmatize as criminals those who were economically vulnerable—the unskilled workingmen, often of ethnic/racial minorities, some of whom were incarcerated in the state prison.
The workingmen who were charged with desertion or non-support criticized these disciplinary practices in the court. Some defendants emphasized economic difficulties beyond their control and denied the criminality of their behavior. Others problematized the gender biased legal system which only punished the man who failed to fulfill economic responsibilities, by claiming that their wives also failed to live up to the middle-class standard of domesticity.
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