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Age of Consent Campaign, 1886-1914, Introduction
The WCTU organized purity societies for boys and men to help them resist sexual
temptation. The organization also undertook a major petition drive to convince
legislators to raise the age of consent and make sexual contact with adolescent
girls illegal. The WCTU publicized all of their social purity activities through their
journal, the Union Signal.[5]
Woman's rights activists also supported the age of consent campaign because
of their view that male privilege resulted in the sexual ruin of young women, and
they used the pages of the Woman's Journal, the leading national suffrage
publication, to inform readers of the progress of the campaign. Some women's
rights supporters, notably Emily Blackwell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Helen
Hamilton Gardener (see documents 13, 14, 15) came to argue that adequate legal
protection of women and girls could only be achieved when women won the right to
vote. Stanton highlighted how male sexual privilege contributed to women's secondclass
citizenship in her preface to Gardener's novel about a young working girl who
was seduced and ruined by her employer. She wrote, "I have long waited and
watched for some woman to arise to do for her sex what Mrs. Stowe did for the
black race in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' a book that did more to rouse the national
conscience than all the glowing appeals and constitutional arguments that agitated
our people during half a century. . . . In Helen Gardener's stories, I see the promise,
in the near future, of such a work of fiction, that shall paint the awful facts of
woman's position in living colors that all must see and feel." (See Document 13)
These women activists felt strongly the injustice of the sexual double standard and
argued it must be abolished before women could truly be emancipated.
The age-of-consent campaign inspired a broad base of support because it
expressed deep cultural tensions over gender, class, and race. Middle-class women
reformers believed that female downfall was a direct result of male exploitation, and
yet they did not question the purity of themselves and their daughters; rather, they
argued that working-class girls, outside of the protection of a good home, were the
targets of male vice. These women did not challenge the sexual exploitation of
African-American women either; the slow rate at which Southern women took up
the age-of-consent campaign illustrated their reluctance to protect black women
from sexual violence.[6] The following documents illustrate these tensions within the
campaign to raise the age of consent.
Abstract Document
List
http://womhist.binghamton.edu/aoc/intro.htm (3 of 4) [6/5/2005 8:50:32 PM]
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Document