Producing the Prurient through the Pedagogy of Purity: Childhood Sexuality and the Social Purity Movement

Abstract

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.