A feminist historian gives a summary of the Social Purity Movement – the 19th century pre-curser of feminism and the origin of the Sexual Trade Union. The historian – Laura Hapke – makes the claim that the Social Purity Movement was ‘not fully feminist’ because it tended to opppose contraception and abortion. This is merely a judgement from a left-wing contemporary feminist eager to maintain that such issues are intrinsic to feminism. In fact, they are secondary. The only necessary and defining features of
Social Purity Movement was a movement to elevate morality and improve the sexual treatment of women, largely through the abolition of prostitution and the double standard. From the last three decades of the nineteenth century to the end of World War I, an international crusade to purify sexual conduct focused on the need to reeducate society, particularly men, in the control of sexuality. Rooted in earlier women’s temperance and moral reform traditions, the American Social Purity movement was influenced by
Composed of widely diverse groups divided on the issues of free love and women’s political and economic rights, the American movement, like its British counterpart, was united in the need for a single moral standard, and the word “chastity” figured frequently in the literature. Because Social Purists believed in woman’s need to resist sexual subjection by men, the movement had feminist participation. Suffragists were featured speakers at the first American Purity Congress in Baltimore in 1895, and Purists a