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Age of Consent Campaign, 1886-1914, Introduction
The campaign ultimately proved very successful; by 1920 almost every state had
raised the legal age of consent to either sixteen or eighteen.
The campaign attracted diverse supporters. Its mainstream consisted of white
middle-class women who championed many of the issues raised by the American
Female Moral Reform Society in the 1830s and 1840s: the elimination of
prostitution and the end of predatory male sexual behavior.[2] The campaign also
drew support from the suffrage movement, since leaders like Elizabeth Cady
Stanton believed that male sexual privilege contributed to women's second-class
citizenship. Because the movement focused so strongly on the risks incurred by
wage-earning girls while away from home, it also recruited the support of reformers
who sought to improve women's working conditions. But the movement did not gain
the support of politically-active African-American women, who feared that stricter
criminal laws would lead to further targeting of African-American men, while doing
little to protect young black women in the South from sexual exploitation by white
men.
The campaign rested on a narrative of seduction that portrayed middle- and
upper-class men as sexual predators who preyed on the innocence of young, white,
working girls. Some of these girls, reformers believed, were lured into "white
slavery," a system of prostitution in which women were bought and sold, while other
girls were simply left to suffer a fate worse than death: the loss of their virtue. These
middle-class women, however, commonly ignored the plight of African-American
women, who were subject to gross sexual exploitation and victimization.[3]
The age-of-consent campaign was part of a larger social purity campaign in the
late-nineteenth century that aimed to reform the morals of American society. The
movement began in the 1870s in response to efforts to regulate prostitution in
American cities; social purists organized to defeat efforts to regulate prostitution,
believing that prostitution was a social evil that needed to be abolished, not
regulated. The key organization in this movement was the New York Committee for
the Prevention of the State Regulation of Vice, led by Aaron Macy Powell and his
wife, Anna Rice Powell, Emily Blackwell, Abby Hopper Gibbons, and Elizabeth Gay.
These reformers generally believed that male sexual exploitation led women into
prostitution. They publicized their purity ideals through the organization's journal,
the Philanthropist, founded in 1885.[4]
Women's groups, most importantly the Woman's Christian Temperance Union,
also supported the social purity movement and in particular the age-of-consent
campaign. The WCTU created an official Social Purity Department in 1885, at the
beginning of the campaign to raise the legal age of consent. The WCTU undertook
educational and reform work to protect women from moral downfall, but just as
importantly, they aimed to transform attitudes toward the sexual double standard.
http://womhist.binghamton.edu/aoc/intro.htm (2 of 4) [6/5/2005 8:50:32 PM]