Regulating Desire: From the Virtuous Maiden to the Purity Princess

Examines the organized efforts to reshape the law relating to young women's sexuality in the United States.

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 wh...