Imperiled Innocents

Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America

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by Nicola Beisel

Princeton University Press

Due/Published September 1998, 288 pages, paper

ISBN 0691027781

New in paper!

As Beisel points out, moral reform vomements claiming to protect children began to emerge in the US over a century ago, most notabl when Anthony Comstock and his supporters crusaded to restrict the circulation of contraception, information on the sexual rights of women, and "obscene" art and literature. Much of their rhetoric influences debates on issues surrounding children and sexuality today. Drawing on Victorian accounts of pregnant girls, prostitutes, Free Lovers, and others deemed "immoral," Beisel argues that rhetoric about the moral corruption of children speaks to an ongoing parental concern: that children will fail to replicate or exceed their parents' social position.

"An examplary work of cultural analysis. . . . Imperiled Innocents persuasively demonstrates the empirical pwer of cultural analysis and its significance for at least one core theoretical question in the discipline, the production and reproduction of class. . . . Beisel has constructed both an elegant work of cultural analysis and a powerful theoretical lens through which to reconsider the moral controversies of our own time."--Elisabeth S. Clemens, American Journal of Sociology