Social purity movement

The social purity movement was a late 19th-century social movement that sought to abolish prostitution and other sexual activities that were considered immoral according to Christian morality. Composed primarily of women, the movement was active in English-speaking nations from the late 1860s to about 1910, exerting an important influence on the contemporaneous feminist, eugenics, and birth control movements.[1] The movement helped to shape feminist views on prostitution.

The roots of the social purity movement lay in early 19th-century moral reform movements, such as radical utopianism, abolitionism, and the temperance movement. In the late 19th century, "social" was a euphemism for "sexual"; the movement first formed in opposition to the legalization and regulation of prostitution, and quickly spread to other sex-related issues such as raising the age of consent, sexually segregating prisons, eliminating abortion, opposing contraception, and censoring pornography.[2]

See also

Notes

Citations

  1. Olasky (1992), p. 127.
  2. Gordon (2002), pp. 72–73.

Bibliography

Further reading


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