19th Century Purity Campaigns

Horrified by the moral and gendered implications of the proposed scheme to regulate prostitution, a loosely connected network of clergy and activists with longstanding ties to a range of reform causes—including women’s rights, abolitionism, and moral education—joined together under the leadership of the newly created New York Committee for the Prevention of State Regulation of Vice, hereinafter the New York Committee, to protest what they viewed as the incorporation of evil into law

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Drawing upon the interrelated motifs of the destructive power of unconstrained male lust and the devastating consequences of female ruin, purity reformers advanced two primary arguments to support their demand that states raise the age of sexual consent to eighteen or twenty-one. First, emphasizing the vulnerability of young women in the years following the onset of puberty, they argued that the state had a duty to protect them from predatory men who sought to take advantage of their youthful innocence. Second, reflecting their view that the loss of virginity outside of marriage was the greatest disaster that could befall any woman, they also argued that the state should strengthen existing moral constraints on illicit conduct by making it legally impossible for young women to consent to sexual activity. As developed below, in turning to the state, the purity reformers both challenged male sexual privilege, with its implied right of access to the adolescent female body, and sought to write the sacred value of female virginity into law.

Ehrlich, J. Shoshanna. “You Can Steal Her Virginity but Not Her Doll: The Nineteenth Century Campaign to Raise the Legal Age of Sexual Consent.” Cardozo JL & Gender 15 (2008): 229.

http://www.cardozolawandgender.com/uploads/2/7/7/6/2776881/15-2_ehrlich.pdf