Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933

Abstract

Purifying America explores the widespread middle-class advocacy of censorship as a popular reform around the turn of the century and provides a historical perspective on contemporary debates over censorship, morality, and pornography that continue to divide women. 'Makes significant contributions not only to our knowledge of the WCTU and of pro-censorship activism, but more broadly to our understanding of progressivism and of cultural dynamics of gender and class as they intersected with reform efforts in the sixty years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century' - Nancy K. Bristow, H-Net Reviews.