Purifying America: The Women's Moral Reform Movement and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1883-1933

For most Americans in the late twentieth century, the word censorship raises fears of the repression of free speech and the invasion of personal privacy. My dissertation documents the existence of a widespread pro-censorship movement in the United States from 1883 to 1933. I explore the advocacy of censorship as a popular reform, and the social conditions whereby censorship was transformed and expanded into a debate about the regulation of society's morals and the articulation of American culture. This study bridges social and political history by demonstrating how lay and professional organizations worked to expand the legal definition of censorship to problems beyond the reading or viewing of legally "obscene" images. Part I of the thesis focuses on the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, a woman's moral reform organization that devoted considerable time and activism to the favoring of censorship through its Department of Purity in Literature and Art, and Part II on the American Library Association, a professional organization that believed in librarian's duty to monitor what books the public could have access to. This dissertation deals directly with ethical and moral questions surrounding the advocacy and implementation of censorship. The WCTU's attempts to increase the authority and domain of the federal government exemplify the pervasiveness of the Progressive era's expansionist program for social change. Whereas other women's groups defined themselves in hostile relation to social science experts and the new dialogue on the child, the WCTU tried to make use of expert knowledge and apply it to its own concerns.