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The intense ambivalence of James Joyce's references to Oscar Wilde throughout Joyce's literary career poses a riddle to which scholars have proposed an array of answers. This article seeks the basis for Joyce's simultaneous identification and disidentificati on with Wilde in the strata of painful affect that informs collective subjectivity in the modern nation-state. In late 19th century Britain, two nebulous new crimes, coined at the urging of the Social Purity movement--gross indecency, and custodial neglect--rendered families and communities newly vulnerable to punitive child loss. The enforcement of these new laws created conditions under which one might lose custody of one's children based on a charge that could be brought by anyone, based on anything, or nothing. Gross indecency and child neglect were both ill-defined and highly stigmatizing. Both were difficult to defend against, while their most terrible consequences were often extra-judicial. In De Profundis, Oscar Wilde conveys the dehumanizing anguish of extra-judicial punishments that could be indiscriminately imposed on a new kind of moral criminal by depicting the loss of his children as a figurative crucifixion. This article charts accounts by social historians describing the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children's early years in Dublin, and the organization's impact on socially precarious families, alongside episodes from Joyce's biography, and his literary reinventions of these episodes. Using passages from De Profundis that influenced Joyce's writing, historical accounts of moral policing introduced by the Social Purity movement, and Joyce's biographical materials, letters, and published writing, this article connects changing affect in Joyce's childhood family to the intense aversion, outrage and empathy that color his recurrent allusions to what he termed Oscar Wilde's 'civil death.'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the contexts of nonconformism and social purity that underpin Michael Field's (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) verse drama Brutus Ultor (1886). Based on new archival research, the article explores Bradley's role in the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act and argues that the play is a complex commentary on the social purity movement and, in particular, on W.T. Stead's campaigning journalism. More broadly, the article argues for the importance of Michael Field's nonconformist background in the development of their oeuvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates the extent of advertising in the Irish press in the years before and after the foundation of the Irish Free State for the "female pills" widely understood to induce abortions. These advertisements appeared very frequently in a wide range of Irish publications for several decades prior to 1922, and the article establishes the ways in which the advertisements functioned as an open secret strategically ignored by both legal and moral authorities. The style and content of the advertisements themselves, which allowed this open secret to operate in plain sight, is explored in detail, along with the context in which the advertisements were produced, circulated and likely understood by women readers. The article concludes by examining the advertisements' gradual and then complete disappearance from the Irish press, especially in light of the Free State legislation enacted during the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on "E. M. Forster: Nature, Culture, Queer!" conference by the International E. M. Forster Society in Ludwigsburg, Germany on April 13-14, 2018. Topics discussed include nature, culture and queer in novelist E. M. Forster's works and life; the pressures placed on feminism, sexuality by the social purity movement; and the intricate relationship between nature and humans in the novel to show how they co-exist, constructing a unified ecosystem.

In the early years of the twentieth century, city administrators in Halifax, Nova Scotia articulated a new, modern identity for the former imperial garrison town by identifying the local red light district as both a moral and a spatial problem. Between the twilight of Victoria’s reign and Britain’s entry into the First World War, middle-class toleration of a local sex district as a means of managing the city’s populations of imperial servicemen virtually evaporated. Haligonians were inspired instead by North American urban modernisation initiatives to eradicate this visible and physical space for the world’s oldest profession. This paper examines shifting responses to the imperial sexual and political ideologies underpinning collective toleration of Halifax’s racially mixed sex district, offers a case study of this crucial moment of civic refashioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the second half of the nineteenth century, British social purity campaigners framed the pornography trade as a major source of cultural and moral pollution. As in their anti-prostitution efforts, purity campaigners presented the abolition of pornography as an attempt to protect women, children, and impressionable members of the lower classes from sexual immorality. Their rhetoric and policy efforts, however, reveal deeply entrenched fears of middle-class vulnerability to the negative effects of pornographic literature and images. Building on existing obscenity studies scholarship, this article explores the role of class and gender tension in nineteenth-century pornography regulation. In contrast to the majority of work on Victorian pornography, this article focuses on the British lower classes as producers and distributors rather than consumers of pornography. In addition, this article argues for a higher level of female participation in the pornography trade than has been previously recognized. By focusing on the contradictions and biases at the heart of campaigns against pornography, this article explores the ways in which regulation efforts and discourses of obscenity were shaped by the class and gender dynamics of the pornography trade. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the portrayal of spinsters in the unpublished writings of Australian feminist Stella Miles Franklin. I emphasise the ways Franklin's spinster narratives are shaped by her feminist social purity and New Woman intellectual and artistic influences, as well as by her personal experiences as an unmarried woman. I suggest that Franklin joins New Woman writers beginning to portray spinsters as sympathetic characters, but goes one step further in scripting these 'old maids' as attractive, intelligent, and competent. Such portrayals include nuanced representations of unmarried women as first, witty, vivacious, and physically attractive characters; second, women who negotiate romantic relationships with men for themselves and others; and third, characters involved in feminist civic-minded work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archival data offers rich source material for examining the complicated, and often paradoxical, deployment of the sexual child within protection literature crafted in the Anglophone West during the early 19th century. Drawing on a psychosocial framework, I analyze the affective and ideological subtext of social purity narratives in order to understand how and why it came to feel so natural for reformers and their primary audience – middle-class parents. I argue that the social construction of the sexual child within this discourse rests upon longstanding ideological preoccupations and middle class anxieties regarding class and race distinction. Attempts to secure the myth of middle-class purity through the disavowal of the middle-class child’s autoeroticism functioned as a foundational fantasy in calls for protection. In the end, the construction of the sexual child within this protection movement was largely a figment of middle-class anxiety and defense, but one which nevertheless had and continues to have powerful cultural resonance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nineteen thirteen was an extraordinary year for Stella Miles Franklin. Alongside her hectic schedule with the National Women's Trade Union League in Chicago, Franklin worked on a variety of manuscripts, including the suffrage play “Aunt Sophie Smashes a Triangle”. I focus on this play about male adultery, contextualising it in her personal relationships and intellectual life, especially in the ways Franklin's interest in social purity, feminism, and the influence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman coincided with moral movements abounding in Chicago during 1913. Energised by the progressive literary endeavours of the period, Franklin makes three important points in this protest play about male adultery that include: the degeneracy of masculinity that leads to male susceptibility for adultery, the dangers of domesticity that help explain male infidelity, and the necessity of women's economic independence and solidarity to survive the realities of male adultery in society. In this latter claim, Franklin subverts the polarisation of wife and mistress and presents women as allies united in resisting male sexual transgressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular discourses on the problem of sexualisation are beset by emotively charged rhetoric that all-too-often promotes a visceral and affective response as opposed to reasoned and nuanced examination. Drawing on materials from the Social Purity Movement (1860–1910) as well as contemporary anti-sexualisation literature, this article argues that a historical-situated perspective may help authors, activists and advocates offer a more reflexive perspective on ‘the problem of sexualisation’. We forward a historically informed discourse analysis to render visible the longstanding, and deeply problematic, assumptions of childhood, gender and class at work in current concerns on sexualisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christian involvement with advocacy and activism on human trafficking, an umbrella category that refers to the variety of processes by which individuals become enslaved, has proliferated during the last 15 years. This essay briefly introduces the topic of human trafficking, and provides an overview of three social movements that set important historical precedents for Christian anti-trafficking activism in the present: 19th century abolitionist movements, late 19th- and early 20th-century social purity movements, and the late 20th century religious freedom movement. Next, I explore two of the anti-trafficking frameworks that underlie much Christian anti-trafficking activism and advocacy in the U.S., noting their different assumptions about freedom and slavery. While Christians are largely of one mind that human trafficking is wrong, the strategies that they use and the ends they hope to accomplish are varied and even conflicting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An early-twentieth-century movement for social purity in England, Canada and the United States aimed to eradicate prostitution, the double standard of sexual morals and their dreaded corollary, the venereal diseases. Social purists suggested that 'purity education' for children was the best pedagogical prophylaxis against such medico-moral impurity. Popular purity education guides like the Self and Sex Series configured purity education as nature study lessons on reproduction in flora and fauna complemented by a back-to-nature regimen of diet, dress and exercise. Social purists hoped that purity education would induce children to adopt an abstinence agenda promoting heterosexual conventions of chastity before marriage, procreative marital sex and sound parenthood. The Series is used to investigate the ways in which the social purity movement turned to a highly selective vision of the natural order to naturalize the abstinence agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Woman fiction of the fin de siècle brought into conflict patriarchal and feminist ideologies, challenging widely held assumptions about gender roles and the position of women. Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins is an important contribution to the genre, and engages with a number of the key issues that concerned feminists at the end of the nineteenth century, including marriage, the education of women, the double standard, male licentiousness, and the wider issue of social purity. These are also key themes in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — published nearly fifty years before Grand's seminal New Woman text. In this essay, I consider Anne Brontë's text as a forerunner to the New Woman fiction of the fin de siècle, through a comparative examination of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and The Heavenly Twins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century, police-regulated prostitution experienced a burst of attention from Polish-language news media. In this article, Keely Stauter-Halsted considers the extended moment of "moral panic" that unfolded when a series of public exposés revealed the scope and potential dangers of sex trafficking. Taking into account the ways "respectable" urban audiences absorbed revelations of illicit commercial transactions on city streets and increased "white slavery" activity beyond the Polish lands, Stauter-Halsted stresses the image of the prostitute as a threat to the embattled nation. The figure of the impoverished, morally compromised streetwalker encroaching on bourgeois social spaces and invading the bourgeois home challenged the sense of middle-class respectability so crucial to Polish national regeneration. By exposing innocent members of the community to sexually dangerous behavior, the prostitute came to represent decay, degeneration, and venereal disease attacking the national body, a conclusion used by social purity activists in their protoeugenics campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information concerning the life and works of English novelist Thomas Hurdy. The author says that Hardy played an active part in the late nineteenth-century debates about femininity, sex education of the young, and the sexual double standard, and was fairly pleased to find the social purity activist Sarah Grand waiting for him at his home.

Drawing on primary materials from the United States, England and Australia, we explore the complex and contradictory manner in which the sexual child and innocence was constructed and made intelligible within social purity discourses in the mid 19th to early 20th century. The sexuality of the child was paradoxically conceptualized as a ubiquitous and boundless erotic force and as a pliable site for pedagogical intervention. We contend that the discursive production of the corrupt sexual companion, within purity literature, was an attempt to disentangle purity reformers' ambivalent construction of childhood sexuality as well as larger cultural anxieties about modern urban living. The sexual child validated social purity narratives because it was the category against which innocence was defined and made possible. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Girls' Friendly Society is a neglected social purity organisation whose exclusive focus on female chastity differed from the rescue work and condemnation of the sexual double standard favoured by most of the social purity movement. The Society's rules restricted membership to virgins and prompted a sixty-year dispute about Christian forgiveness, exposing philanthropic rivalry and clerical division. The virginity policy was maintained throughout the moral challenges presented by sexology, eugenics, birth control, sex education and post-war emancipation, and competition from the Girl Guides, cinema and dance halls. Only rapidly declining membership forced the Society to abandon the policy in 1936. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late-Victorian social purity movement heralded a new phase in the history of moral regulation, generating significant levels of Anglican and Nonconformist support for male chastity and the elimination of the sexual double standard. Historians have so far highlighted the more repressive aspects of these campaigns such as their willingness to use criminal legislation and censorship to elevate standards of public morality. This article rehabilitates the discourse and activity of churchwomen — not least Ellice Hopkins — who were prominent campaigners for social purity. Women purity workers exerted enormous pressure upon the professional hierarchies of church and chapel, actively reworking Christian readings of the body so as to bring the moral influence of the churches to bear upon public opinion. In so doing they brought about a significant transformation in clerical attitudes that regarded discussions of sex as beyond the boundaries of civilized discourse and led in the promotion of a regulatory, but nonetheless highly public, religious discourse on sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The banality of movement and the fascination with mobility meet at the very locations of arrival and departure. This contribution highlights social practices within and discourses about train stations which are interpreted as constitutive moments in the production of gender, sexuality and space. Train stations host the crossing between different spatial and social contexts, the negotiation of scales and between life cycles. Focusing on the historical moment of the early twentieth century we look at Swiss train stations as sites of heightened public concern which served to implement regulatory instruments to govern the social order of modernity. Narratives of the city as danger delineated train stations as critical turning points in the life-journey of young people, particularly for 'impressionable' young women. What is of interest here is how sexualities are discursively and metaphorically constructed and governed by social purity groups within the train station at the turn of the century. The way in which Station Assistance agents 'received', counselled and controlled the arrival of young people in the cities contributed to reiterating and (re)constructing gender and sexuality beyond national boundaries. The resulting protective and prescriptive constructions of sexuality reveal much about the complex perceptions and regulations of rural and urban sexualities and gender systems in their spatial nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the views of Frances Swiney, a prominent British suffragist and social purity activist, related to science and spiritualism. She wrote a number of influential feminist works in the early 20th century. Swiney argued that women represented a higher stage of evolutionary development than men and that the human species was in the process of moving beyond differentiated sex into an androgynous, though essentially feminine, being. Swiney was a well-known suffragist whose writings on sexuality exerted great influence on Edwardian feminism. When she was in her 50s, she began a successful literary career, publishing numerous books and pamphlets on a variety of feminist themes.

Women's social purity groups were significant participants in the debates of the regulation of sexualities during the unification process of Swiss Criminal Law between the 1890s and the 1930s. Although not yet enfranchised, women claimed political participation through their status as 'lay experts' with regard to sexual matters and as an interest group with backing from their male counterparts. The article examines their demands in the reformulation of the regulation of sexualities and investigates their aims and strategies. Their expertise, gained through the experience of and investment in 'moral guardianship', is examined here in relation to their interventions on the age of protection, or the age of consent in contemporary terms. As 'lay experts' on sexual morality, the women's social purity groups participated in the increased interests and discourses of sexuality between 1890 and 1915 in the midst of legal, medical and political experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nineteenth-century feminism and the related social purity movement, and the emergent scientific discourse of ‘sexology’, are usually seen as antagonistic. Both trends, in fact, were in profound opposition to the widespread assumption that the double moral standard was an embodiment of ‘natural’ transhistorical law. This article suggests that feminist agitation against the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s (and other manifestations of the deleterious legal status of women) overtly attacked unthinking social assumptions about sex and gender, destabilising concepts about the naturalness of the existing sexual system and creating the context for the pioneers of sexology to interrogate even further accepted notions of gender and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks into the dangers and pleasures of classified advertising in Great Britain during the early part of the twentieth-century. During the said period, the apparent dangers offered by the personal column became one way of registering the problems and opportunities, as well as the anonymity and immorality of modern life. The relatively unregulated space of the personal column began to be viewed as the gateway to a series of moral dangers, especially for women. Older ideas of sexual danger inherited from Victorian social purity movements merged with more recent anxieties about women's consumption and economic independence. In addition, the medium began to take on the characteristics of those men who would abuse it by making advertising the vehicle for seduction.

Examines the representations of the prostitute and her relationship with the philanthropist or New Woman in fiction and drama of the late-Victorian period. Novels that have the concept of a prostitute heroine; Images of the prostitute in non-literary discourses; Influence of the social purity movement to prostitution.

Focuses on texts published from the 1870s to the late 1920s about female sexuality. Representation of prostitution in the climate of social purity in late-Victorian texts; Authors who wrote articles about free love to mobilize their fantasies of female submission; Details of the erotic novel "Three Weeks," by Elinor Glyn.

The author discusses the novel "What Maisie Knew," by Henry James published in 1897. He argues that the book presents the teaching of the social purity movement as class-based, which is contrary to its original goal of helping the marginalized sector of society. The opinions of John Carlos Rowe, Frederic Jameson and Richard Altick about the novel are also cited. The issue of white slavery is also explored.

Examines the antiobscenity work of Catheryne Cooke Gilman and the organization which she presided, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Women's Cooperative Alliance. Sex education as an antidote to obscenity; Social purity and sex education.

Discusses the development of female cross-dressing as a theme in feminist fiction during England's Victorian period. Background of individual and collective rebellion; Lived experience transmuted into intertextual referentiality; How cross-dressing was linked with the themes of social purity and sexual exploitation; Reconfiguration of the Amazon heroine as a middle-class daughter.

Deals with the invention of the New Woman concept by novelist and social purist Sarah Grand. Forms of femininity; Civic worth and eugenization of love; Discussion on social purity and eugenics.

ABSTRACT Women who accompanied male adventurers and geographers often made crucial (yet generally unacknowledged) contributions to the research and writing of their partners. These women were not always named as authors, but nevertheless participated in the production and promotion of texts, influencing their form and their impact. In this light the author reconsiders the works of Isabel Burton, wife of the famous British Victorian traveller, geographer, translator and author, Richard Burton. Reinterpreting and recentring the marginalised and often caricatured Isabel Burton, it is shown that Isabel performed many roles in the `Burton industry', influencing the production, content and circulation of texts attributed mainly to her husband. While Isabel frequently worked with her husband, she sometimes worked against him, subverting and recasting `his' texts, partly in order to oppose her husband's sexual libertinism and to advance her own political agenda, which can be located within late-Victorian social purity movements. Isabel's involvement with the gendered politics of purity illustrates the second dimension in what the author calls the two fold sexual politics of authorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the campaigns against "immoral" and "obscene" literature initiated in the 1890s by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the National Council of Women of Canada (NCWC) were integral to feminist reformers' broader project of moral regeneration and nation-building. Underlying these efforts was a widespread anxiety about the survival of an idealized family structure and a discourse that relied heavily on the moral "innocence" of children and their vulnerability to delinquency and moral corruption through exposure to impure printed materials. These rhetorical devices provided the impetus for a moral crusade advocating the suppression of reading materials intended for both children and adults, ranging from crime-story newspapers and "sensation" novels to works of contemporary fiction. The article also examines several formal and informal strategies adopted by the WCTU and the NCWC - in cooperation with other social purity groups - to combat immoral literature, including the promotion of "pure" literature and women's cultural literacy, and their efforts to employ the apparatus of the state and secure legislative reform. It concludes that these censorship initiatives, while allowing women reformers to repudiate conventional notions of feminine passivity, also rendered manifest some of the most coercive aspects of the early women's movement while reinforcing the prevailing values of English-Canadian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on women police in World War I. Duties and job responsibilities; Selection and training; Discrimination; Reputation; Civilian reactions; Role of feminism; Campaigns on social purity and wider feminist ambition.

Focuses on the divorce case between Virginia Crawford and Sir Charles Dilke of England and its implication to gender, class and narrative competition during the Victorian era. Facts presented in court; Sharing of moral and juridical language of guilt and innocence; Justifications of sexual double standard; Relationship between progressive reform and social purity.

Examines Oscar Wilde's endorsement of the ideals of social purity in his play, `An Ideal Husband.' Moralization of politics; Abandonment of the double sexual standard for men and women; Assessment of utility on the basis of personal development; Emphasis on female consumption and pleasure; Extinguishing of female individuality through the insistence on purity.

This article focuses on moral subjects. Sociologists, legal scholars and historians interested in understanding the periodic recurrence of moral panics have not enjoyed access to a wide array of sophisticated analytical techniques. Moral panics are often ridiculed rather than explained, and when attempts at explanation are made, these often consist of reductionist moves to translate the apparently irrational content of a particular panic into other, more rational categories such as economic dislocation or loss of group status. Characteristic features of moral-reform discourse, such as allegories and metaphors which seem overblown and irrational to those observing the panic from a position of the sociologist Emile Durkheim's objectivity, are generally dismissed as empty rhetoric unworthy of close scholarly attention, except perhaps by psychoanalysts. A concrete analysis of the discourse of moral and social degeneration mobilized by the social purity movement could help to address this difficult impasse.

The article outlines some of the historical precedents for the current state of affairs, namely, the relationship during the Progressive Era, 1880-1930, between social feminists, social purists, and criminologists. Today in the United States as well as most patriarchal capitalist societies, the state and its juvenile justice system processes primarily young women for specific violations of normative conduct and sanctions them severely. The late nineteenth and early twentieth-century feminist movement was involved in a number of moral reforms, in particular an attack on prostitution. Feminists eventually joined in a coalition with the conservative social purity movement to rise the age of sexual consent in an effort to protect young girls from allegedly being forced into prostitution through the so-called white slave traffic. However, the end result was not a decrease in the sexual exploitation of young girls but, rather, the prohibiting of working-class girls right to engage in heterosexual activity when they pleased, and therefore the creation of a new class of female offenders, teenage sex delinquents.

During the nineteenth century prostitution became labeled as "The Great Social Evil" by contemporaries. This article attempts to unravel some of the complexities in the circumstances surrounding this labeling by Victorians through the investigation of some of the problems and controversies which prostitution raised in society. In studying the trade in terms of its social, medical and moral implications on Victorian life though contemporary writings, it can be demonstrated that the prostitute's failure to meet middle-class social and gender ideals, the threat she posed to the nation's health, and the moral implications of sin and vice meant that the prostitute had the potential to make an impact on every level of society, and thus attracted much public and state interest towards herself and her trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]