“SEXUAL REVOLUTIONS” THAT HAVE AFFECTED OUR SEXUAL NORMS

Sexual norms and gender equality have been crucial concerns of various social and political movements throughout our history. These include the civil rights and antiwar movements as well as the movements for women’s equality and gay liberation. They all have had a major impact on our attitudes toward sex and sexuality today. Here are some of the highlights:

First-Wave Feminists: The Women’s Movement— Suffragists and Abolitionists

Women began fighting for the right to vote—suffrage—20 years before the Civil War. The suffrage movement was born out of the abolitionist movement that fought to outlaw slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott held the first women’s rights conference in Stanton’s home in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.

The suffrage movement split from the abolitionist movement before the Civil War began. Some women found it unacceptable that men in the movement wanted to postpone the suffrage effort until after slaves were emancipated. Many women remained with the abolitionists under the leadership of Lucy Stone. Others formed their own movement under Stanton, Mott, and Susan B. Anthony. They widened the suffrage agenda to include issues such as divorce reform, sexism in the church, and assistance for workingwomen.

Temperance and Moral Reform

In 1874, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was established to work for moral reform. The union worked toward eliminating prostitution, improving public education, and enacting universal suffrage. Its chief goal, however, was temperance—abolishing the sale of alcohol. Union members believed that drinking was a threat to the American home—that drunken husbands wasted money on liquor and were abusive to their wives and children.

The social purity campaign against prostitution grew out of the temperance movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Its members worked to create a single standard of sexual conduct in the belief that prostitutes were the victims of male vice.

The Sexual Revolution of the 1920s

The soldiers who experienced the sexual norms of Europe during World War I changed the sexual norms of the United States when they returned home. They became much more likely to have intercourse with women for whom they cared than with prostitutes or casual sex partners. Young women and men began to develop equality in romantic relationships and sexual behaviors. The number of women who had sexual intercourse before marriage increased from 25 percent at the turn of the century to 50 percent by the 1920s.

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