“In Terror of Jack the Clipper”: Sexual Violence and the Creation of a New (Hetero)Sexual Body in Gilded Age Chicago

Following the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders in England, the American press documented a spate of unusual, violating, and often violent attacks against women in urban areas across the United States perpetrated by men known as ‘Jacks.’ Cities and towns dealt with Jacks the Kisser, Jacks the Hugger, Jacks the Measurer, Jacks the Ink Slinger, and Jacks the Slugger, among others, all who performed the actions their monikers described. These Jacks and the responses to them captured the intertwined Gilded Age struggles over women’s bodies, (potentially misdirected) sexual desire, and growing urban spaces. As a cultural figure, the American ‘Jack’ reflected not only the changing everyday sexual and gendered experiences of women and their communities, but the deep currents of sexual violence that lay at the core of American society.

Perhaps the most well documented of these Jacks is ‘Jack the Clipper,’ the subject both of my dissertation and this poster. A long-forgotten American cultural figure, Jack the Clipper cut the hair from young ladies’ heads without their consent. Between 1896 and 1906 more than eighty-five named women in Chicago, and hundreds across the country, had their hair forcibly removed by Clippers. Narratives of these Clipper attacks reveal that these crimes were sexual in nature, playing upon older notions of the sexual body and the overlap between the categories of sexuality, sex, and gender. For Chicago women, an attack on their hair was an attack against their womanhood and their femininity.

Focusing on these violent encounters not only illuminates new aspects of women’s sexual experience at the turn of the century, then, but a deeper conflict between competing discourses of sex embodied in differently sexed bodies. Clippers conveyed larger structural changes taking place within the discourse of sexuality in the United States as it moved from the Victorian era into the twentieth century: the Victorian body, characterized by a constellation of physical attributes used to determine ones biological sex, gave way to a burgeoning, twentieth-century, medicalized (hetero)sexual body that located sex with greater specificity, most often in the genitals. Not only, then, do Clippers challenge our understanding of sexual bodies and definitions of sexual violence, but they raise important questions about how heterosexuality was written onto the body at the turn of the century.