by Anonymous
Purity culture has reemerged in varying forms throughout the cultural history of the United States, adapting to different political moments, media landscapes, and social anxieties. Our project traces how ideals of purity, modesty, sexual restraint, and traditional family values have been used to define who is considered moral, respectable, and worthy of protection.
Beginning with the postwar housewife ideal of the 1950s and 1960s, we examine how conservative visions of womanhood positioned domesticity, heterosexual marriage, and motherhood as the foundation of social order. We then consider the backlash and rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s through the Sexual Revolution, feminist organizing, and queer liberation movements. Rather than disappearing, purity culture responded to these shifts by reasserting itself through new political and religious movements. Our project also explores how purity culture is never neutral. It has been shaped by race, gender, sexuality, and class. Through Black feminist critique, we examine how Black women were historically denied the category of “purity” through stereotypes like the Jezebel trope and through medical exploitation
We also analyze how purity culture reinforces heteronormativity, homophobia, transphobia, and strict gender binaries by treating heterosexual marriage and reproduction as the only legitimate forms of sexuality and family. Finally, we connect these histories to contemporary trends such as tradwife content, social media aesthetics, pronatalism, and conservative moral politics. By combining historical narrative, critical theory, and our interview with Dr. Mary Hunt from WATER, we argue that purity culture is not only a religious or personal belief system. It is also a political tool that controls bodies, limits autonomy, and disguises power as morality.
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