Tino Balio (ed.), Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise 1930-1939, vol.5 History of American Cinema, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1993.
Balio notes that films were controlled on three levels, the state and local censorship boards, pressure gruops such as the Catholic Legion of Decency and the Association of University of Women, and the self-regulation of the Production Code Administration. (p.4)
Marjorie Heins, Not In Front of the Children: "Indecency", Censorship and the innocence of youth, Hill and Wang, New York, 2001.
'By the 1930s, the effects of Freudianism,
feminism, artistic innovation and post-World War I cultural upheavals could
be nperceived in the courts. The first jurisprudential dent in the
Hicklin
harm-to-minors standard came with a modest sex education pamphlet by Mary
Ware Dennettt, a birth control and women's suffrage leader.' (p.42)
In a 1930 Second Circuit Court of Appeal
narrowed the Hicklin principle, by finding that 'explicit speech is acceptable
as long as it is not conveyed in "clearly indecent" terms. This was
an advance from the rigours of Hicklin, in that it recognized a
legitimate social interest in satisfying the sexual curiosityof youth,
but it left open the large question of when language becomes "clearly indecent,"
and who is to decide.' (pp.43-44: quote from Heins who is quoting Augustsu
Hand, the judge in the case.)
In 1934, james Joyces Ulysses was charged
with obscenity. In a decision by the Second Circuit, it was held
that the work was not obscene. "A. hands opinion for himself and
his cousin Learned now repudiated the
Hicklin harm-to-minors test
and in its place enunciated an obscenity standard that considered the "dominant
effect" of a work, "taken as a whole", on the average person rather than
the possibly libidinous impact of selected passages on the most vulnerable
child' (p.45)
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