Sara Moslener. Virgin Nation

According to Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence, twentieth-century feminists were not the first group to assert that the personal is political. Sara Moslener’s monograph argues that evangelical Protestants in the U.S. have a long history of politicizing the bodies of their young through sexual-purity campaigns. Contemporary sexual-purity groups are typically seen as a reaction to the sexual revolution, but Moslener claims that recognizing the nineteenth-century provenance of these movements explains their full “cultural and political impacts” (4). Virgin Nation aims to show that “the ideological connections drawn between sexual immorality and national security include several cooperating impulses: evangelical political activism, deep anxiety over gender roles and changing sexual mores, fear of moral decay, apocalyptic anticipation, and American nationalism” (4–5). This blend of politics, sexuality, and theology created a lasting conviction among evangelicals that sexual purity was and is salvific for the individual and the nation. Chapter 1 argues that the late nineteenth century marked a shift in how evangelical Protestants conceived of gender, sexuality, adolescence, and the adolescent’s relationship to the nation. Using profiles of influential American thinkers, including psychologist G. Stanley Hall, evangelist Dwight L. Moody, and educator-reformer Frances Willard, Moslener contends that the sexual activity of youths, once a relatively private matter of family honor or shame, was made into an issue of theological and political import. Hall, who gave theological language to the new psychological category of adolescence, “framed sexual awakening as an initiation into the human race and its march toward progress” (47). Evangelicals accepted the notion that adolescence had critical value. This premise, combined with an apocalyptic theology of a nation in moral decay, created a special mission for young evangelicals: construct ideal women and men (gendered according to the white, Protestant, middle-class standards of the era). Sexually pure women and men, who created more of the same, could save the country by upholding the kind of masculinity and femininity needed for nation-building.

Human sexuality · Immorality · Morality · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sexual revolution · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies