The Purity Wars:

Abstract

This article seeks to understand the contemporary prevalence of projects of moral regulation. It explores the potential and limitations of accounts that point to similarities between today's moral politics and the sexual purity campaigns of the late 19th century. It explores two recent significant, but very different, works on the history of moral regulation movements: Nicola Beisel's Imperiled Innocents (1997) and David Wagner's The New Temperance (1997). This article seeks to show that the purity campaigns of the late 19th century and the new movements from the late 1970s are of special significance because of the central role of female activists and feminist currents of thought. The account offered seeks to integrate the interaction of class and gender relations. It refuses any cyclical account of moral regulation movements, but offers an account focusing on the tensions between gender and class relations in the two periods which account for the remarkable similarities between these two periods.