Abstract

Excerpted From: Taylor Nicolas, “Who Was Your Grandfather on Your Mother's Side?” Seduction, Race, and Gender in 1932 Virginia, 35 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 851 (2024) (156 Footnotes) (Full Document)

Was Dorothy Short Black? And, more importantly, did she know it? These questions, odd-sounding and perhaps unsettling to the contemporary reader, were the ones raised by Leonard Harry Wood in the hopes of avoiding prison.

In April 1931, Leonard was convicted of felony seduction by the Circuit Court of Rockingham County and sentenced to two and a half years' incarceration. The court had found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of “unlawfully and feloniously seducing under promise of marriage one Dorothy Short, an unmarried female, of previously chaste character.” Dorothy was left not only heartbroken but also with child. Leonard appealed, and the Virginia Supreme Court reversed his conviction, remanding the case on a question of fact: Dorothy's knowledge of her purported racial identity.

Seduction, one of the peculiar (and now defunct) “heartbalm” laws, has a long historical pedigree with roots stretching back to the seventeenth century. The right of action originally allowed fathers--and, by the nineteenth century, women themselves--to sue for damages where consent was obtained with the promise of marriage and that marriage never came. In broad terms, seduction laws sought “to avoid private vengeance, to curb male sexual behavior, and to disgrace or harm the violator as much as a fallen woman.” Chastity was a virtually constant prerequisite element of the crime, and over time seduction became increasingly moralistic, fixated on protecting the virtue of (primarily White) women. In the mid-nineteenth century, White women reformers in New York led the charge to criminalize seduction. And by 1921, thirty-seven of forty-eight states, Virginia included, had criminal seduction statutes on their books.

This Article looks closely at the story of Dorothy Short and Leonard Wood, their relationship, and the criminal case that followed it in order to explore the ways in which seduction laws worked to create and recreate gendered racial categories, reinforcing the boundaries of White and Black womanhood and dictating the ways that each was to be performed. At the same time, the Virginia Supreme Court's ruling in Wood and Dorothy's lived experience are an obvious testament to the plasticity of race and to the inconstant ways courts have sought to make sense of it. Although seduction laws were facially race-neutral, but explicitly gendered (that is, under the law, a woman could not “seduce” a man), they cannot be understood without considering both race and gender. Seduction laws, moreover, sit not only at the intersection of race and gender, but also at the intersection of laws regulating sex and governing marriage.

This Article looks to the existing scholarship on seduction and on marriage, in particular the scholarship on laws criminalizing interracial marriage (sometimes called “miscegenation” or “anti-miscegenation” laws). The two bodies of literature are, in a sense, complementary; the seduction scholarship tends to discuss gender at length, but not race, while the scholarship on laws criminalizing interracial marriage tends to consider race more fully than gender. The scholarship on seduction has not, for example, explored the ways in which seduction laws, because of their reliance on the substantive law of marriage (including laws prohibiting interracial marriage), worked to both reinforce and police racial categories. That is notable because, for most of the seduction era, every seduction lawsuit or prosecution was set against the backdrop of laws criminalizing interracial marriage; thus, every seduction case necessarily involved some form of judicial racial inquiry and determination, whether explicit or implicit. The scholarship on laws criminalizing interracial marriage, by contrast, has reckoned with the effect that those laws had on the formation of racial categories, but tends to treat gender only summarily (likely because, unlike seduction laws, laws prohibiting interracial marriage were never expressly gendered).

As Peggy Pascoe, Ian Haney López, and other scholars have suggested, “the legal system does more than just reflect social or scientific ideas about race; it also produces and reproduces them.” Pascoe's work is especially instructive; she treats interracial marriage court cases as data points that, when plotted, chart the emergence and evolution of different racial ideologies over time. I follow in her footsteps, only looking instead to the crime of seduction and to one case in particular. Thus, this Article's main contribution is shedding new light on Wood v. Commonwealth of Virginia, and more broadly on the ways in which seduction laws influenced racialized understandings of gender then and now.

I begin by offering the legal and historical context of Wood. That context includes the evolution of seduction laws, Black women's engagement with them, and, separately, the Virginia legislature's increasingly frenetic efforts to establish a stable and administrable definition of race in the years leading up to 1932. With that foundation laid, I turn to Wood. I conclude by analyzing the Virginia Supreme Court's decision in that case and discussing the lessons that it continues to offer race, gender, and identity conversations in the United States today. As Haney López writes, “Race is neither an essence nor an illusion but rather an ongoing, contradictory, self-reinforcing, plastic process subject to the macro forces of social and political struggle and the micro effects of daily decisions.” Wood is a testament to that and more.

[. . .]

Seduction laws, heartbalm label notwithstanding, were never about heartbreak. They were always about the value of a woman's chastity--first as her father's property interest, and later as her own moral one. Today, although far from perfect, laws, both civil and criminal, directed at non-consensual sexual encounters are more carefully crafted and far more accessible than they were during the height of seduction. Seduction laws sought to protect the “pure, innocent, and inexperienced woman who may be led astray from the paths of rectitude and virtue by the arts and wiles of the seducer under promise of marriage.” Ultimately, however, whatever void may have been left by the decline of seduction has not been filled as much as it has become obsolete with the changing of social norms.

As noted at the outset, while scholars have analyzed the ways in which law shapes social conceptions of race and, separately, have analyzed seduction jurisprudence, this Article explored how seduction laws were powerful shapers of race and gender, not separately, but together, reifying White womanhood and its performance in the courtroom. As Pascoe writes, “In practice, laws banning interracial marriage acted as a kind of legal factory for defining, producing, and reproducing of the racial categories of the state.” Seduction laws were similar factories--race-making by virtue of their reliance on substantive marriage laws, gender-making by virtue of their drafting.

Dorothy's case is remarkable not just for its rarity and the record that survives. The case is undeniably part of the “reformulation of race in the United States that began with the abolition of slavery and, in turn, continues to circumscribe the vision of racial equality projected by the Reconstruction Amendments.” True, “[m]arriage may not be the first thing that comes to mind when considering America's entrenched history of racism”; as Pascoe notes, “slavery, the denial of voting rights, and the segregation of railroads and schools have all attracted more attention.” The same can be said, perhaps even more so, of seduction laws. Today, it is largely accepted that there is no scientific basis to racial distinctions, but questions of identification, self-identification, and self-knowledge continue to capture the public and private minds of the nation. Direct-to-consumer biotech companies like 23andMe cater to the ever powerful desire many have to know who their grandfather on their mother's side and forebearers more generally “really” were.

Wood v. Commonwealth is thus a case about race, law, identity, sex, and regulation--in it, the Virginia Supreme Court placed Dorothy Short's knowledge above all other considerations, including the considerable body of scientific racism that dominated the discourse on race at the time. That is not to suggest that the Wood decision was somehow radical--it was not. While the court chose consciousness over blood, at the same time it accepted and reinforced the existing legal-racial framework and racial hierarchy. In that respect, then as now, the case continues to resist easy classification.

B.A., Yale University, 2015; J.D., Stanford Law School, 2022.