Regulating Desire

From the Virtuous Maiden to the Purity Princess

J. Shoshanna Ehrlich

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781438453040, 9781438453057
• eBook ISBN: 9781438453064
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Starting with the mid-nineteenth-century campaign by the American Female Moral Reform Society to criminalize seduction and moving forward to the late twentieth-century conservative effort to codify a national abstinence-only education policy, Regulating Desire explores the legal regulation of young women's sexuality in the United States. The book covers five distinct time periods in which changing social conditions generated considerable public anxiety about youthful female sexuality and examines how successive generations of reformers sought to revise the law in an effort to manage unruly desires and restore a gendered social order. J. Shoshanna Ehrlich draws upon a rich array of primary source materials, including reform periodicals, court cases, legislative hearing records, and abstinence curricula to create an interdisciplinary narrative of socially embedded legal change. Capturing the complex and dynamic nature of the relationship between the state and the sexualized youthful female body, she highlights how the law both embodies and shapes gendered understandings of normative desire as mediated by considerations of race and class.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Predatory Men and Virtuous Maidens: Saving Young Women from Ruinous Seduction
• Chapter 2: Protecting Her Most Prized Possession: The Campaign to Raise the Age of Sexual Consent
• Chapter 3: Responding to the “Girl Problem”: The Emergence of the Female Sexual Delinquent
• Chapter 4: Our Daughters Are Having Babies: The Fashioning of a Public Response to the Teen Pregnancy “Epidemic”
• Chapter 5: Our Daughters Are Having Sex: The Conservative Pushback against Teen “Promiscuity”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover