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Frances Willard, "Social Purity Work for 1887," Jan 1887
A. Willard is referring to the Criminal Law Act, which was passed in Britain in
response to the public outcry following William T. Stead's exposé of white slavery in
"The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon," published in the Pall Mall Gazette in
1885. The Act raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.
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B. Between 1864 and 1869 the British Parliament passed a series of Contagious
Diseases Acts which regulated, rather than abolished, prostitution. Josephine Butler
carried a manifesto signed by two thousand prominent British women to Parliament
in 1870, and she and her sympathizers succeeded in having the acts repealed.
American women active in the social purity movement greatly respected Butler's
work.
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C. Ellice Hopkins was a British purity reformer who publicized the age of consent
issue in her 1883 pamphlet Social Wreckage. She advocated preventive social work
to save working girls from falling into vice and prostitution.
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D. Benjamin De Costa was an Episcopalian minister from New York who began the
White Cross Army, patterned after the Church of England's society, in 1885.
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E. Dr. and Mrs. James H. Kellogg accepted the superintendency of the WCTU's
Department of Social Purity in 1885. They also ran a sanitarium in Battle Creek,
Michigan, and invented breakfast cereals as their contribution to diet and health
reform. A simple diet, many reformers believed, would keep the sexual appetite in
check.
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F. Dr. Kate Bushnell was a W.C.T.U. missionary who provided sensational reports
about the system of white slavery that existed in Michigan for the New York World.
For more on the Michigan vice camps, see Document 8.
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