Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work 2 Volume by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

PURITY MOVEMENTS

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meet bare survival needs, others selected prostitution as a course that they thought was the least

problematic among a number of other poorly paid, exploitative, drudging, even boring income

options. Many working-class women pursued this line of work for its comparative advantage

over other employment available to them, such as industrial, retail, or domestic work. Still others

maintained “legitimate” jobs while supplementing their income with prostitution. Many simply

desired a means to live with some amount of leisure, comfort, independence, and small luxuries.

This complexity underscored the reformers’ social distance from those they wished to save.

Reformers attempted to develop programs to steer prostitutes into alternative, albeit unskilled,

employment. The reformers saw this as offering honest work to a “lost” girl, but the girls them-

selves often saw it otherwise: as a return to low-wage exploitation without the nicer clothes and

entertainments that went along with their previous lives in the sex trade.

Prostitution continued to grow despite the many tangible political victories won by the move-

ment. Yet the aims of the purity campaigns were broader. Reformers identified prostitution as

“the social evil” for reasons beyond sexual propriety. For the middle class, prostitution came to

symbolize a thorough commercialization of all aspects of intimate life, which was widely sen-

timentalized in the Victorian period. Nonmarital sex also implied the loss of virginity, which

middle-class commentators associated with a loss of social status and marriageability. This view

of virginity does not appear to have been widely shared by working-class girls.

The Decline of the Social Purity Movements

By the turn of the 20th century, reformers in the United States refocused their energies

toward abstinence from alcohol. Also, a number of city governments by the 1910s had convened

vice commissions to do research, publish reports, and develop recommendations on prostitution.

The social science–trained fieldworkers hired to examine the problem developed the consensus

opinion that, while present, coercion into the sex trade was largely anecdotal. Concluding that

entry into prostitution was mainly voluntary, municipal leaders returned to an older tone of

moral condemnation of the prostitute. The previous elimination of licensed brothels and red

light districts put “the social evil” more out of sight, and continued attempts to suppress prostitu-

tion focused on the arrest, incarceration, and “rehabilitation” of prostitutes. The era of “rescue”

was over.

See also Abolitionism; Marriage; Purity Movements.

Further Reading: Butler, Josephine. “The Double-Standard of Morality.” Philanthropist, October

1886; Grittner, Frederick K . White Slavery: Myth, Ideology, and American Law. New York: Garland,

1990; Pivar, David J. Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868–1900. Westport, CT:

Greenwood Press, 1973; Rosen, Ruth. The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982; Vice Commission of Chicago. The Social Evil

in Chicago: A Study of Existing Conditions. Chicago: Gunthorp-Warren Printing Company, 1911;

Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Pamela Donovan

PURITY MOVEMENTS. Social purity campaigns in the United States and Britain addressed

prostitution and other issues of sexuality (such as age of consent, white slavery, and birth

control), usually taking the position that unregulated sexuality caused widespread social

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PURITY MOVEMENTS

damage. Although many organizations worked alongside the police, they had no legal authority

and were generally independent “vigilante” movements.

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