Social purity movement

The social purity movement was a late 19th-century social movement that sought to abolish prostitution and other sexual activities that were considered immoral according to Christian morality. Composed primarily of women, the movement was active in English-speaking nations from the late 1860s to about 1910, exerting an important influence on the contemporaneous feminist, eugenics, and birth control movements. The movement helped to shape feminist views on prostitution.

The roots of the social purity movement lay in early 19th-century moral reform movements, such as radical utopianism, abolitionism, and the temperance movement. In the late 19th century, "social" was a euphemism for "sexual"; the movement first formed in opposition to the legalization and regulation of prostitution, and quickly spread to other sex-related issues such as raising the age of consent, sexually segregating prisons, eliminating abortion, opposing contraception, and censoring pornography.

See also

• Social hygiene movement
• Birth control movement in the United States
• Comstock law

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