Regulating Desire
140 pages
English

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140 pages
English

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Description

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.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Predatory Men and Virtuous Maidens: Saving Young Women from Ruinous Seduction

2. Protecting Her Most Prized Possession: The Campaign to Raise the Age of Sexual Consent

3. Responding to the “Girl Problem”: The Emergence of the Female Sexual Delinquent

4. Our Daughters Are Having Babies: The Fashioning of a Public Response to the Teen Pregnancy “Epidemic”

5. Our Daughters Are Having Sex: The Conservative Pushback against Teen “Promiscuity”

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Informations

Publié par
Date de parution 30 septembre 2014
Nombre de lectures 0
EAN13 9781438453064
Langue English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

REGULATING
DESIRE
REGULATING
DESIRE
From the Virtuous Maiden to the Purity Princess
J. SHOSHANNA EHRLICH
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production by Jenn Bennett
Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ehrlich, J. Shoshanna.
Regulating desire : from the virtuous maiden to the purity princess / J. Shoshanna Ehrlich.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5305-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
E-ISBN 978-1-4384-5306-4 (ebook)
1. Young women—Sexual behavior—United States—History. 2. Sex crimes—United States—History. 3. Seduction—United States—History. 4. Premarital sex—United States—History. 5. Sexual ethics—United States—History. I. Title. HQ29.E355 2014 176 .4—dc23 2013043166
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Alan, Emma, my father, and the memory of my mother
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
C HAPTER 1
Predatory Men and Virtuous Maidens: Saving Young Women from Ruinous Seduction
C HAPTER 2
Protecting Her Most Prized Possession: The Campaign to Raise the Age of Sexual Consent
C HAPTER 3
Responding to the “Girl Problem”: The Emergence of the Female Sexual Delinquent
C HAPTER 4
Our Daughters Are Having Babies: The Fashioning of a Public Response to the Teen Pregnancy “Epidemic”
C HAPTER 5
Our Daughters Are Having Sex: The Conservative Pushback against Teen “Promiscuity”
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
To start, I would first like to acknowledge that an earlier section of chapter 3 was published as an article entitled “You Can Steal Her Virginity But Not Her Doll: The Nineteenth Century Campaign to Raise the Age of Legal Consent,” in the Cardozo Journal of Law Gender 15, no. 2 (2009): 229–46, and an earlier section of chapter 5 was published as an article entitled “From Birth Control to Sex Control: Unruly Young Women and the Origins of the National Abstinence-Only Mandate,” in the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 30, no. 1 (2013): 78–99.
As I near the completion of this book, it gives me great pleasure to be able to thank the many people and institutions who have assisted and encouraged me along the way. Although, as with most scholarly undertakings, I have certainly had my moments of frustration, this endeavor has been a labor of love that has benefited greatly from the support I have received.
During the course of my research for this book, I was fortunate enough to be assisted by the dedicated librarians and archivists at the following institutions: the Boston Athenaeum, the Francis Willard Archives, the New York State Archives, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and Simmons College. I also want to extend a special thanks to the outstanding research and interlibrary loan librarians at the University of Massachusetts Boston—my home institution. In particular, I want to acknowledge: Natalie Coady, Janet DiPaolo, George Hart, Tina Mullins, and Janet Stewart who responded to what, at times, must have seemed like endless requests for assistance and obscure material with unflagging patience, persistence, and good humor.
I am also deeply appreciative of generous support I received from the following scholars who took time out of their busy schedules to comment on various chapters and/or respond to inquiries that I had along the way. The book has benefited greatly from the collective wisdom of: Alesha E. Doan, April R. Hanes, Carol Hardy-Fanta, Jean Humez, Jamie Ann Sabino, Maris A. Vinovskis, and Daniel S. Wright. I would also like to acknowledge all of the support and encouragement I have received over the years from my colleagues in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at UMass Boston. It is an honor to be part of such a committed and caring group of feminist activist-scholars.
I also had the pleasure of working with a number of terrific research assistants from the University of Massachusetts Boston, Northeastern University School of Law, and the University of Vermont. So many thanks to: Sarah Adragna, Roxanna Cheng, Suzanne M. Fuchs, Audrey Grace, Cheyanne Gracia, Jess Guerriero, Dara Heffler, Zoe Lewis, and Emma Stoskopf-Ehrlich for the hard work and the great energy that you all brought to this project. I would also like to thank Beth Bouloukos and Jenn Bennett of SUNY Press for all of their expert guidance and support in seeing this book through to print.
On a more personal note, I want to thank my friends and siblings for their sustained support and encouragement, particularly during the moments when I wondered if I had been foolhardy to attempt a project that spans such a wide swath of time. With gratitude and love to: Chris Bobel, Sue Cohen, Amy Ehrlich, Josh Ehrlich, Esther Ehrlich, Amani El Jack, Marian Klausner, Anita Martin, Ellen Resnick, Deborah Schwartz, and Debbie Wolozin. A warm thanks also to all my swim friends at Simmons College Masters Swimming and on the Boston LANES team, with a special shout out to coach William Yepes. The many hours in the pool with all of you has helped me to stay balanced and focused during the course of writing this book.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the sustaining love and support I have received from three very special people in my life. To my father, Fred Ehrlich, your unwavering belief in my ability to complete this book has been a source of inspiration. To my husband Alan Stoskopf and my daughter Emma Stoskopf-Ehrlich, I am forever grateful for all the joy you bring to my life, and a special thanks for all that you did to help keep me on track over the many years I have spent writing this book. You are the center of my world.
Introduction
In 2006, I published a book entitled Who Decides?: The Abortion Rights of Teens that focuses on the highly contested issue of whether young women should be able to terminate a pregnancy without the knowledge or consent of a parent. 1 Of central importance to me in working on this book was to try and make some sense out of the law’s inconsistent treatment of pregnant teens based upon their intended pregnancy outcome.
In brief, as discussed in the book, while states typically treat pregnant teens who decide to carry their pregnancy to term as legal adults with full decisional authority over this choice, as well as over all related pregnancy-related medical decisions, the Supreme Court has given states the constitutional green light to enact laws—which most have since done—that require teens who instead seek to terminate a pregnancy to either involve a parent, or seek authorization for an abortion through an alternative process—typically a court hearing. In reaching the decision that mandating third-party adult involvement in the abortion decision was constitutionally permissible, the Court expressed concern about the decisional vulnerability of teens. Stating that they frequently lack the ability to “make decisions in an informed, mature manner” that takes account of “both immediate and long range consequences,” the Court thus looked to parents to serve as a useful counterweight to youthful immaturity. 2
This legal dualism made little sense to me—How was it that a pregnant teen could be regarded as fully competent to make the decision to become a mother, while being characterized as too immature to make the decision to avoid motherhood without adult involvement? Given that women not uncommonly move between options before settling on a final decision to either abort or have a baby, it became increasingly clear that this schema essentially means that the law regards a young woman’s capabilities as fleeting and transitory, shifting each time she reconsiders her pregnancy options. As detailed in the book, my perplexity was enhanced by my previous experience as a lawyer representing countless teens in Massachusetts who had sought judicial authorization for an abortion rather than involve their parents, as these young women typically reasoned about their situation in complex and multidimensional ways that were at odds with the Court’s pinched representation of their reality. 3
As I sought to make sense of this, I ultimately concluded, based upon a careful textual analysis of leading Supreme Court decisions involving the abortion rights of minors, that the answer to this seeming paradox lay in the emerging pro-natalist tilt of the Court. In short, rather than reflecting a genuine concern about the decisional vulnerability of pregnant teens, the Court’s underlying justification for adult involvement laws was that they served a newly articulated state interest in “protecting potential life.” 4 It thus appears that the true function of these laws is to encourage a young woman to discuss “the consequences of her decision in the context of the values and moral or religious principles of their family.” 5 However, given that this appears to be an actualized state interest only when her decision is to abort rather than carry to term, I ultimately concluded that these laws are driven by beliefs about the value of having a teen discuss her understanding of “the origins of the other human life that lie within the embryo … within the family, society’s

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