Wild Women in Jazz Age Odessa and New York: Sex, Crime, Jews, and Gender in the Global 1920s.

As a category for interpreting allegedly immoral lives, "wildness" has been a way to name, and to justify policing and disciplining, willful unruliness thought to threaten a society's core values, civic order, and norms of behavior. This article uses the category of wildness, recently elaborated in social theory, to examine evidence in an atypical global comparison: early communist Odessa (Odesa today) and capitalist New York City in the 1920s. The focus is on urban "moral storytelling" about sex, crime, gender, and ethnicity. East European Jewish women were prominent in this disorderliness. The article examines "wildness" beyond the particularities of place, without effacing difference—an approach to comparative history and global history as entwined and hybrid. American moral campaigns and Soviet efforts to build a new socialist "everyday life" shared common anxieties about, and determinations to rein in, moral disorder and deviance, especially the linked transgressions of sex and crime. The shared ground was the ubiquity of disorienting behaviors variously named in English and Russian as wild, willful, wayward, deviant, perverse, debauched, and pathological. Perhaps because so much was at stake, and because these concerns cut so deeply into the fabric of human lives, moral absolutism was elusive—for the judges and for the judged. These stories mixed defiance with desperation, refusal with subjection, and utopian possibility with realistic skepticism about the limits to liberation in an unequal patriarchal world. The forces of order, discipline, and suppression remained strong precisely because so were the forces of disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]