Too Old to Spank?...How Three Young Women Asked for Advice in 1898, 1928 and in 1948
by
Here are three letters to the Editor written by young women over a fifty year period about when is a girl too old to be spanked.
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Letter Number 1 was written on April 1, 1898 by a young woman who had recently turned seventeen to the Editor of the NY Evening Journal...
To the Editor: I am a young girl just turned seventeen years, an orphan, and I have live with my aunt who has taken care of me since I was seven years old. She is just as good as can be, and loves me dearly, I know, but is awful strict, and spanks me very often when I don't do just as she says, and though I try real hard to please her, I get spanked two or three times some days, except Sundays. She just catches me anywhere and pulls me over her knee and slaps me good with anything that comes handy. Now I tell her it is not right to spank such a big girl, but she says I will never be too big for her to spank when I don't do as she says. Won't some of your readers write a letter with real good reasons why she ought to stop spanking me, so that when I see it, I can show it to her, so she will stop?--A GOOD GIRL
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Letter number 2 was written June 5, 1928 to the New York Daily Mirror by a twenty year old office girl.
Editor Daily Mirror:
I would like to get the opinion of some readers on this question: Has a mother a right to spank a daughter who has passed her twentieth year? I was twenty last December and since that time she has turned me over her lap three times and spanked me soundly with a hairbrush. Though I realize she chastises me for my own good, and despite the awful sting of the hairbrush on my anatomy, I love her most dearly but still I think twenty should be beyond the spanking age. I wonder if there are other girls my age who still receive spankings from their parents. May G.
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The third letter in this triology was written by a bobby-soxer to the American Weekly twenty years after the second letter and almost a half century after the first, but the question is still the same.
In March, 1947, Nancy Pearce wrote to Ursula Trow, Editor of the Teen Temptest" column of American Weekly the following..."I am a so called bobby-soxer of 15 years, and I have a very old fashioned mother. I came home rather late from a dance the other night. She made me lie across her lap and then she spanked me very hard with a hairbrush".
"I sometimes wonder if I am the only girl in the country as old as I am who gets spanked like a kid".