Chastity

Chastity in U.S. History

While our understandings of sexuality and sexual behavior have changed over time, sexuality has always had a major role in the maintenance of social hierarchies. In particular, behavioral norms and standards historically have been stratified by gender, social class, and race. Ideals of chastity functioned as an important regulatory device in directly managing women's sexuality and indirectly to control male sexual behavior through expectations of female restraint.

According to D'Emilio and Freedman's provocative history of sexuality in America, it was not until the postcolonial period that women were thought to possess the innate qualities of purity and chastity. During this period, female chastity was linked with the absence of sexual desire. Prior to this, chastity had been seen as a form of self-control and not as biologically female.

While young women were expected to abstain from sexual behavior due to a lack of desire, expectations were different for young men, for whom concerns centered around excessive masturbation. Masturbation among males was not only said to lead to disease and insanity but it was also thought that the loss of sperm depleted the energy system, leaving them less economically productive. Masturbation was also linked to intellectual inferiority, a particular concern among the middle classes. Writing at the turn of the 20th century, G. Stanley Hall, the psychologist credited with the identification of adolescence as a developmental stage, contended that adolescent chastity (meaning the maintenance of chastity between the time of puberty and marriage) separated the civilized from the savage. He and other experts recognized that for men, abstinence from sexual activity, including masturbation, was a struggle—a tacit acknowledgment of the perceived differences in sexual interest between men and women. According to Hall, this period of prolonged chastity both marked and created the distance between whites and other races.

In a movement led largely by women to battle prostitution and other urban vices, the sexual virtue of women was increasingly pressed into service as a moral reform device for men. Women reformers called for a single standard of morality for both men and women, to be based on sexual chastity outside of marriage. Rather than changing standards of male purity, the early decades of the 20th century witnessed shifting notions of appropriate female sexuality. Formal courtship rituals gave way to a more peer-directed system of social organization between the sexes. Dating sometimes led to premarital sexuality, but this typically was limited to likely marital partners, and if pregnancy resulted, marriage was quick to follow. Chastity remained the ideal for young women, but there was a less rigorous social infrastructure to enforce female chastity. Beginning in the 1950s, the ideological underpinnings that supported ideals of extramarital chastity were breaking down as sex educators, other social scientists, and adolescents began to question what they saw as an outdated moral order. There was no longer a clear moral consensus on form and function of sexual activity.

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