Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920

By Mary E. Odem

Delinquent Daughters explores the gender, class, and racial tensions that fueled campaigns to control female sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Mary Odem looks at these moral reform movements from a national perspective, but she also undertakes a detailed analysis of court records to explore the local enforcement of regulatory legislation in Alameda and Los Angeles Counties in California. From these legal proceedings emerge overlapping and often contradictory views of middle-class female reformers, court and law enforcement officials, working-class teenage girls, and working-class parents. Odem traces two distinct stages of moral reform. The first began in 1885 with the movement to raise the age of consent in statutory rape laws as a means of protecting young women from predatory men. By the turn of the century, however, reformers had come to view sexually active women not as victims but as delinquents, and they called for special police, juvenile courts, and reformatories to control wayward girls. Rejecting a simple hierarchical model of class control, Odem reveals a complex network of struggles and negotiations among reformers, officials, teenage girls and their families. She also addresses the paradoxical consequences of reform by demonstrating that the protective measures advocated by middle-class women often resulted in coercive and discriminatory policies toward working-class girls.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2000
• ISBN: 9780807863671

Mary E. Odem

Mary E. Odem is associate professor of history and women's studies at Emory University.

Book preview

DELINQUENT

Daughters

GENDER AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Coeditors

Linda K. Kerber

Nell Irvin Painter

Editorial Advisory Board

Nancy Cott

Cathy N. Davidson

Thadious Davis

Jane Sherron De Hart

Sara Evans

Mary Kelley

Annette Kolodny

Wendy Martin

Janice Radway

Barbara Sicherman

DELINQUENT

Daughters

PROTECTING AND POLICING ADOLESCENT FEMALE SEXUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES, 1885–1920

Mary E. Odem

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 1995 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Odem, Mary E.

Delinquent daughters: protecting and policing adolescent

female sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920/Mary E. Odem.

p. cm.—(Gender & American culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-2215-9 (cl.: alk. paper).—ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-4528-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8078-2215-9 (cl.: alk. paper).—ISBN-10: 0-8078-4528-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Teenage girls—United States—Sexual behavior—History. 2. Sexual ethics—United States—History. 3. Social problems—United States—History. 4. Social control—United States—History. 5. Middle class—United States—Sexual behavior—Attitudes—History. 6. Working class—United States—Sexual behavior—History. I. Title. II. Series.

HQ27.5.034 1995

306.7′0835—dc20 95-13185

CIP

Portions of Chapter 5 appeared earlier as City Mothers and Delinquent Daughters: Female Juvenile Justice Reform in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles. In California Progressivism Revisited, edited by William Deverel and Thomas Sitton, pp. 175–99. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Portions of Chapter 6 were published earlier as Single Mothers, Delinquent Daughters, and the Juvenile Court in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, Journal of Social History 25 (September 1991): 27–43.

10 09 08 07 06 9 8 7 6 5

Winner of the 1994 President’s Book Award, Social Science History Association.

FOR MY PARENTS

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1

White Slaves and Vicious Men: The Age-of-Consent Campaign

Chapter 2

Teenage Girls, Sexuality, and Working-class Parents

Chapter 3

Statutory Rape Prosecutions in California

Chapter 4

The Delinquent Girl and Progressive Reform

Chapter 5

Maternal Justice in the Juvenile Court

Chapter 6

This Terrible Freedom: Generational Conflicts in Working-class Families

Conclusion

Appendix: A Note on Court Records

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frances Willard, 1895 83

A white slave trapped inside a brothel, 1910 84

A young woman being lured into a dance hall, 1910 85

Women workers in a fruit-packing factory, ca. 1915 86

Women office workers, ca. 1910 87

Amusement park at Long Beach, California, 1920 88

Promenade at Long Beach, 1909 89

Young women in bathing costumes, 1910 90

Mexican youths at Venice Beach, ca. 1925 91

Alice Stebbins Wells, 1910 92

Janie Porter Barrett, ca. 1884 93

Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles County, 1914 93

Miriam Van Waters, 1925 94

TABLES

1. Legal Ages of Consent in the United States, 1885 and 1920 14

2. Number and Proportion of Women in the U.S. Labor Force, 1870-1920 22

3. Percentage of Women Workers in Nonagricultural Occupations, 1870-1920 23

4. Disposition of Statutory Rape Cases in Alameda County, California, 1910-1920 76

5. Sentencing in Statutory Rape Cases, Alameda County, California, 1910-1920 77

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has benefited from the support of many generous people and institutions. For financial assistance I am grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Huntington Library, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Western Association of Women Historians, Emory University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Numerous friends and colleagues have read and criticized various drafts of this book or portions of it. Linda Kerber’s comments on several drafts were invaluable, as was her enthusiastic support of this project. I have also benefited from the insightful comments of Estelle Freedman, Lawrence Friedman, Linda Gordon, Robin Kelley, Joanne Meyerowitz, Peggy Pascoe, and Christina Simmons. Steven Schlossman has generously shared his time, resources, and knowledge of the juvenile justice system with me. Two close friends and fellow women’s historians, Sherry Katz and Leslie Reagan, have given me emotional and intellectual support during the years of writing this book. I have benefited from their critical readings of my work and from our many conversations about women, reform, sexuality, and the law.

I owe a great debt to my teachers at the University of California, Berkeley, especially my adviser, Larry Levine, for his constant encouragement and intellectual guidance throughout this project. On many evenings, Larry and his wife Cornelia opened their home to me and other graduate students to enjoy lively discussions about our dissertations, much laughter, and delicious meals. Other teachers—Paula Fass, Kristin Luker, Michael Rogin, and Mary Ryan—have offered probing criticism and have continually challenged me to refine my ideas and analysis.

Numerous friends and colleagues in graduate school read various chapters of this study, and I am very grateful for their constructive comments and support during the years of research and writing. Many thanks to Laureen Asato, Stephen Aron, Michael Bess, Nancy Bristow, Robby Cohen, Bill Deverel, Larry Glickman, Paul Gorman, Anne Hyde, Lynn Johnson, Cathy Kudlick, Mark Meigs, Shirley Moore, Maura O’Connor, Michael O’Malley, Burt Peretti, Steven Petrow, Madelon Powers, Gerda Ray, Lucy Salyer, and Glennys Young.

The History Department and Women’s Studies Institute at Emory University have supported this project by offering me leave time and a stimulating community of scholars. I am especially grateful to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Jonathan Prude for their perceptive comments on the manuscript and sound advice about publishing. And special thanks to Margot Finn for her warm friendship, sharp criticism, and unfailing wit. I appreciate the comradely assistance of other Emory colleagues—Bill Beik, Michael Bellesiles, Tina Brownley, Geoff Clark, Cindy Patterson, Jim Roark, and Steve White. My graduate assistants, Lee Polansky and Patti Duncan, offered valuable help with the last stages of research. Thanks also go to Bradley Epps and Alan Taylor and to my former colleagues at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University—Deborah Coon, Phil Ethington, Nancy Green, Susan Hunt, Peter Mancall, and Lisa Wilson—for the intellectual support and companionship they provided during a critical year of research and writing.

Kate Douglas Torrey, my editor at the University of North Carolina Press, has offered me encouragement and excellent advice at every stage. I am also indebted to Pam Upton at UNC Press for her excellent recommendations and skillful copyediting of the manuscript.

The staffs of numerous archives and libraries have greatly assisted me in carrying out the research for this book. In particular, I wish to thank the librarians and archivists at the Chicago Historical Society, the Huntington Library, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Newberry Library, the Oakland Public Library, the Schlesinger Library, the U.S. National Archives, UC-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, UCLA’s Department of Special Collections, USC’s Regional History Center, the Urban Archives Center at California State University, Northridge, and the interlibrary loan departments at UC-Berkeley’s Doe Library and Emory University’s Woodruff Library. My thanks to the archivists who helped me to locate photographs for the book—Carolyn Cole, Simon Elliot, Dace Taub, Tom Sitton, and Jenny Watts.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents, brothers, and sisters and my close friends Melanie, Ingrid, and Ralph, whose love and good humor have sustained me through the writing of this book.

DELINQUENT

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INTRODUCTION

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the sexuality of young single women became the focus of great public anxiety and the target of new policies of intervention and control by the state. Middle-class reformers and social experts expressed mounting concern about the sexual dangers and temptations that appeared to surround young working-class women in American cities. They conducted many investigations, produced a barrage of reports, and organized nationwide purity campaigns calling for government attention to the problem. Their demands resulted in an elaborate network of legal codes and institutions designed to control the sexuality of young women and girls. In particular, age-of-consent laws made sexual intercourse with teenage girls a criminal offense, and newly established juvenile courts, reformatories, and special police monitored and punished young females for sexual misconduct.

Campaigns for the moral protection of young women were not a new phenomenon in the late nineteenth century. Since the beginnings of urbanization and industrialization in the United States, middle-class Americans had worried about the impact of major social changes on the morality of young working women. In the period from 1820 to 1850, reformers in northeastern cities engaged in numerous efforts to prevent the corruption of morals among wage-earning women. Inspired by evangelical Protestantism, they ventured into working-class neighborhoods to set up missions, distribute Bibles, and establish rescue homes to convert wayward women to a Christian way of life.¹ What was new in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, was the broadened scope of the campaigns and the mounting demands for state regulation of the problem. Public anxiety about the morality of young women greatly intensified and spread to all regions of the country during this period of rapid urban and industrial growth. Instead of the religious and voluntary efforts pursued earlier, moral reformers now began to insist on a forceful response from the state.

This book explores both the moral reform campaigns that produced new policies of sexual regulation and the actual enforcement of those policies at the local court level. It focuses on four sets of protagonists who had distinct, often competing goals and interests in this process: middle-class reformers who led moral campaigns; state officials (judges, police, probation officers) responsible for enforcing the new legal measures; working-class teenage girls who were the principal targets of sexual regulation; and working-class parents who became active participants within the legal system.

The expanded state regulation of adolescent female sexuality was part of a broad trend toward greater control of sexual behavior in general. Expressions of sexuality that did not conform to a marital, reproductive framework were increasingly subjected to government surveillance and control, as evidenced by a range of legal measures enacted during the period. These included legislation prohibiting the dissemination of obscene literature, the criminalization of abortion, stringent measures targeting prostitution, and heightened legal repression of homosexuality. Such developments reflected Americans’ deep anxiety about the increased potential for sexual expression outside of marriage—a situation that threatened middle-class Victorian ideals of sexual restraint and marital, reproductive sex.²

The particular anxiety about adolescent female sexuality stemmed from profound changes in the lives of young working-class women and girls that increased their opportunities for social and sexual autonomy. Rapid urban growth and the expansion of industrial capitalism, which affected all aspects of national life, greatly altered the experience of adolescence for daughters in working-class families. New avenues of employment and recreation in American cities drew them increasingly out of the domestic sphere and into a public urban world where they experienced unprecedented freedom from family and neighborhood restrictions. Instead of being limited to domestic work or household manufacture, the main forms of female employment in the nineteenth century, young white women now had access to jobs in factories, department stores, and offices. These new prospects fundamentally altered the context of female labor as daughters worked in settings free of family supervision. Young African American women did not share in the new employment opportunities and were confined primarily to domestic service. But they too enjoyed greater social autonomy as they left farm households in the rural South to live and work in American cities.³

In the evenings after work, young women participated in a new world of commercialized leisure that further undermined familial control. The dance halls, movie theaters, and amusement parks opening in cities throughout the country catered to a young, mixed-sex crowd. In contrast to their mothers before them, young working women attended nightly entertainments with male and female peers instead of participating in family and neighborhood activities.⁴ Within the youth culture that took shape in American cities, working-class daughters explored romantic relations and heterosexual pleasures outside of marriage. City streets, workplaces, and amusement centers all provided spaces for flirtation and intimate encounters with young men away from the watchful eyes of parents and neighbors.⁵

As they earned wages in stores, offices, and factories and spent their leisure hours in dance halls and movie theaters, young women were constructing a new social role for themselves. They were departing from a centuries-old pattern and ideal in which daughters had passed directly from the control and supervision of their parents to that of their husbands. An unprecedented number of young working-class women and girls now enjoyed a period of relative autonomy that lasted from the time they entered the paid labor force until they later settled into marriage. As they challenged traditional roles and expectations, working-class daughters became the focus of great social anxiety. Their move outside the home was linked to a host of social problems—prostitution and vice, venereal disease, family breakdown, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. It was in response to these fears that middle-class reformers organized their nationwide campaigns to demand state regulation of female sexuality.

Delinquent Daughters traces two distinct stages of moral reform and regulation during this period that indicate an important shift in the way Americans conceived of and sought to control the sexual behavior of female youth. In the first stage, which began in the mid-1880s, white purity activists launched a national effort to make sex with teenage girls a criminal offense by raising the age of consent. Their demand was based on the belief that seduction by adult men was the major cause of moral ruin among young women and girls. Female reformers challenged a widespread perception of the fallen woman as depraved and dangerous by portraying her instead as a victim of male lust and exploitation. The way to protect young women from sexual harm, they argued, was to subject male seducers to criminal penalties.

The second stage took shape during the first two decades of the twentieth century under a new generation of Progressive reformers and social workers, who replaced the model of female victimization with one of female delinquency that acknowledged the sexual agency of young women. Instead of blaming evil men, Progressives looked to social and family environment to explain immorality among working-class female youth. Armed with this revised interpretation of the problem, reformers advocated new forms of sexual regulation that focused on controlling young women and their environments instead of their male partners. These measures included a reliance on special police officers, juvenile courts, detention centers, and reformatories to monitor and correct female sexual delinquency.

I make three main arguments about these crusades for sexual reform and regulation. First, moral campaigns to control teenage female sexuality were fueled by gender, class, and racial tensions in American society.⁶ Middle-class white women stood at the forefront of such campaigns, and for them moral reform was part of a larger effort to overcome women’s subordinate status in home and society. Age-of-consent reformers sought to address women’s sexual vulnerability by challenging male sexual privilege and the double standard of morality. Progressives targeted poverty, low wages, and other social conditions that posed moral dangers to young women and girls. Both groups of reformers called on the state to address these issues, and at the same time they worked to expand female influence within the criminal justice system to ensure adequate legal protection for the members of their sex.

Moral reformers were motivated by concerns about class as well as gender relations. Even while they criticized male sexual behavior and attitudes, they were equally disturbed by assertions of sexual autonomy from young women wage-earners. Their campaigns for protection had a coercive aspect. Reformers assumed the authority to define an appropriate code of morality for female youth, one that was based on middle-class ideals of female sexual restraint and modesty. Young women who did not conform to these ideals were considered wayward and in need of control and rehabilitation by the state.

Moral campaigns were shaped, too, by the deep racial divisions in American society. Middle-class white women might reach across class boundaries, but they did not attempt to cross racial boundaries to address the sexual dangers facing African American women and girls. Racism was especially pronounced in the age-of-consent campaign. Reformers made it clear that their efforts were on behalf of the white slaves of male lust. Progressive women in the early twentieth century were more inclusive in their protective work as they addressed the needs of immigrant and, to a more limited extent, African American women and girls. But, for the most part, the moral protection of black female youth was ignored by white reformers and left in the hands African American women’s clubs and organizations.

My second argument is that sexual regulation by the state had consequences that the reformers had not intended and could not necessarily control. They had succeeded in persuading legislators to enact criminal penalties for seducers and to establish juvenile courts and reformatories for wayward girls but could not ensure that the legal system would enforce these measures as they had planned. Male police and court officials responsible for enforcing age-of-consent legislation showed little concern for—and in some cases clear hostility toward—reformers’ goals of ending the double standard and male sexual privilege.

In the second campaign for moral protection, reformers succeeded in gaining some influence over enforcement through the appointment of women police, women judges, and women probation officers in juvenile courts. Nevertheless, they could not always administer policies in accordance with their goals of protection and rehabilitation of female youth. As professionals within the larger criminal justice system, middle-class women became implicated in repressive and discriminatory policies directed against young working-class women who violated dominant codes of female respectability.

Finally, this book argues that the social and sexual autonomy of daughters was a major source of conflict in working-class families and led many of them into court. Reformers may have created the new policies of sexual control, but working-class parents actively used them for their own needs and purposes. The sexual culture of urban youth clashed not only with middle-class morality, but also with the moral codes of many working-class parents. As their traditional forms of sexual regulation eroded, numerous parents—immigrant and native-born, black and white—sought court intervention to restrain their rebellious daughters. This parental use of the courts to discipline daughters calls for a reassessment of a common view of courts and related institutions as instruments of social control that aimed to impose middle-class values on a resistant working class.⁷ We need to conceive of the court system instead as a complex network of struggles and negotiations among working-class parents, teenage daughters, and court officials.

In recent years, several feminist scholars have presented a forceful critique of the social control interpretation by demonstrating that working-class women attempted to use state and welfare agencies to challenge male authority and abuse in the family. Their work demonstrates the importance of taking gender, as well as class, into account when assessing the role of state institutions in American society.⁸ In addition, we need to consider the generational conflicts within working-class families that led them to seek state intervention. Parents, both fathers and mothers, sought the assistance of courts and public authorities to control disobedient daughters.

We also need to rethink our understanding of working-class family relations during the period studied here. Social historians have often portrayed the working-class family as a cohesive group, bound by ties of loyalty and obligation, with each member contributing to family maintenance and survival.⁹ But this characterization cannot account for the serious generational conflicts that erupted between parents and daughters over questions of sexuality and social autonomy. Heidi Hartmann offers a more compelling view of the family as a locus of struggle wherein people with different activities and interests often came into conflict with one another.¹⁰ I will explore in depth the disputes that brought working-class parents and daughters into court and elucidate their competing concepts of proper female behavior.

This book examines campaigns for moral protection from a national perspective, using newspapers, reform publications, and the personal papers of leading activists. It explores the actual enforcement of the new policies of sexual control through an analysis of criminal and juvenile court records from Alameda and Los Angeles Counties in California. The felony trial court records from the Alameda County Superior Court are particularly fruitful for analyzing statutory rape prosecutions. For the study of female delinquency cases, there is a very rich and detailed set of records from the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court, one of the few sets of juvenile court case files from the early twentieth century that have been opened to scholars. (See Appendix for more information on these case records.)

Like much of the rest of the country, these two counties and their principal cities, Oakland and Los Angeles, experienced dramatic social and economic changes that fueled anxieties about female morality: rapid urban growth, an influx of immigrants, the expansion of new employment opportunities for women and girls, and the emergence of mass commercialized amusements. California was also a major center of moral reform activity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although this fact has received little attention from historians.¹¹ It is not surprising that reform flourished in the state, for along with immigrants and working-class laborers, many native-born, middle-class families also migrated to California during these years, bringing with them moral values and social reform traditions nurtured in the East and the Midwest.

The first three chapters focus on the age-of-consent movement and the last three on the Progressive campaign to control female sexual delinquency. Through an analysis of reformers, court officials, and working-class daughters and their parents, both sections explore the complex ways in which relations of family, gender, class, and race intersected on the terrain of adolescent female sexuality.

CHAPTER 1

‘WHITE SLAVES’ AND ‘VICIOUS MEN’

The Age-of-Consent Campaign

In 1889 members of the California Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) lobbied legislators for a bill that was of great interest both to women in the state and also to the leaders of a national campaign. They aimed to amend the rape statute by raising the age of consent for women from ten to eighteen years. Under the proposed bill, men who had sexual intercourse with young women below that age would be guilty of statutory rape and subject to criminal penalties. The purpose of the law was to provide moral protection for young women and girls and to undermine the double standard of morality. For the previous two years WCTU members had circulated a petition throughout California to gain support for the measure. The petition warned that the increasing and alarming frequency of assaults upon women, and the frightful indignities to which even little girls are subject, have become the shame of our boasted civilization. It called on legislators to address this situation by enacting legislation for the adequate punishment of crimes against women and girls.¹

The reformers encountered stiff opposition to their efforts from male legislators who objected to women’s participation in politics and claimed the proposed law would make men vulnerable to blackmail by immoral, designing young women. Undeterred, WCTU members continued to lobby vigorously for the measure and achieved a partial victory when the legislature raised the age of consent to fourteen. Still not satisfied that the law adequately protected young women, however, the WCTU continued to collect petitions and lobby legislators for the next eight years until state lawmakers voted in 1897 to raise the age of consent to sixteen.²

The effort to raise the age of consent in California was but one battle in a larger national campaign that originated in 1885 among a group of purity reformers in the Northeast and Midwest. At the time, the legal age of consent in most states was either ten or twelve years. This national reform campaign sought to protect young women and girls from moral ruin by subjecting their male seducers to criminal penalties. Within ten years the campaign had spread to all regions of the country, achieving impressive legislative changes and drawing enthusiastic support from suffragists, religious leaders, and labor organizations in addition to temperance advocates.

The campaign found its largest following and most forceful leaders among middle-class white women. Their vigorous activity in the cause stemmed from deep gender, class, and racial tensions over the issue of female sexuality. Most reformers advocated a higher age of consent because they believed that the moral downfall of young women was the direct result of male vice and exploitation. In speeches and campaign literature, they constructed a narrative of seduction that portrayed male seducers as outwardly respectable, middle-class men and their victims as innocent, white, working-class daughters. Through this narrative, women reformers challenged male privilege and the sexual double standard. At the same time, they promoted an image of female purity and passivity that demonstrated the vulnerability of young working-class women by denying their capacity for sexual agency and desire. Moral protection, however, did not automatically extend to all working-class female youth. Reflecting the racism of the dominant society, purity activists largely ignored the sexual dangers facing African American women and girls.

The age-of-consent campaign was part of a broad movement for social purity reform that developed in the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The movement began in the 1870s as a response to attempts by physicians and public health authorities to institute a system of state-regulated prostitution in American cities. Social reformers, Protestant clergy, women’s rights advocates, and former abolitionists joined forces to defeat such regulation bills in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. After their victory over the regulationists, moral reformers expanded the scope of their activities. Moving beyond the defensive effort to end state licensing of prostitution, they now aimed to abolish prostitution altogether and to establish a single standard of morality for men and women. The organization at the heart of this movement was the New York Committee for the Prevention of State Regulation of Vice, whose leaders included, among others, Abby Hopper Gibbons, Aaron Macy Powell, Anna Rice Powell, Emily Blackwell, and Elizabeth Gay. Although its membership was small and concentrated in the Northeast, the organization helped to publicize and coordinate purity reform efforts throughout the country through its journal, the Philanthropist . In 1895 the New York committee joined with other moral reform groups to form a national organization, the American Purity Alliance.³

Another important bastion of purity reform was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Founded in 1874 by middle-class Protestant women, the WCTU aimed to end trafficking in liquor, which its members considered a serious threat to the home and family. They focused on moral suasion and the conversion of drunkards to achieve their goals, and they also engaged in political campaigns for local temperance laws. When Frances Willard became president of the WCTU in 1879 (a position she held for the remaining twenty years of her life), the organization embraced a much broader program of social reform. Under Willard’s forceful and charismatic leadership, members campaigned for a wide range of issues in addition to temperance, including woman suffrage, prison reform, and the eight-hour day for workers. During this period of expansion, the WCTU also became a leader in the social purity crusade. In 1885 it established an official Social Purity Department whose purpose was to promote a single moral standard for both sexes. The WCTU brought great strength and experience to the social purity cause. With nearly 150,000 dues-paying members by 1892 and branches in every state, all major cities, and thousands of local communities, the WCTU was the largest women’s organization in the United States in the late nineteenth century.⁴

The WCTU and other purity organizations initially relied on moral education and voluntary efforts to stop the spread of prostitution and immorality. They established shelters and rescue homes to lead fallen women to a moral way of life. They also carried out preventive and protective work with younger women and girls to keep them from going astray in the first place. They formed travelers’ aid societies to direct young female migrants entering the cities to safe housing and employment. Various groups in cities throughout the country opened boarding homes to provide low-cost lodging and moral guidance for young women workers, and they organized social clubs such as the New Century Guild of Working Women in Philadelphia and the Working Girls’ Society in New York to offer wholesome entertainment in place of morally suspect urban amusements.⁵

Just as important as protective work with girls was the goal of transforming male sexual behavior and attitudes. Toward this end, WCTU members sponsored mothers’ meetings to teach women how to impart moral education to their children, particularly their sons. The mothers were urged to teach boys "that their virginity is as priceless as their sisters’." Reformers also organized purity societies for young men to encourage them to resist sexual temptation. In 1885 Episcopal clergymen established the White Cross Society, modeled after a similar organization in England, to promote social purity among young men. With the enthusiastic support of the WCTU, branches of the White Cross were soon established in nearly every state and territory.⁶

Social purity leaders considered voluntary efforts and moral education important, but they became convinced that these methods alone were not sufficient to protect young women and to control male vice in American cities. They began to demand state attention to the problem with the organization of the age-of-consent campaign in 1885, an effort to convince the government to enforce their vision of moral order by making sexual relations with young women a criminal offense.

American groups were first alerted to the age-of-consent issue by the British purity movement. British reformers believed that an underground system of white slavery existed in London whereby English girls were abducted off the streets by evil procurers and forced into a life of prostitution. Around this time, purity activists on both sides of the Atlantic began to use the term white slavery to describe the sexual