Between 1886 and 1900, the WCTU petitioned every state legislature in the country, garnering more than 50,000 signatures in Texas alone, and dispatched women to legislative sessions from coast to coast to demand that the age of consent be raised to 18. Many lawmakers rejected women’s presence in public affairs and further resented the unprecedented campaign to curtail white men’s sexual prerogatives. So they stone-walled WCTU members, inserted neutralizing or mocking language in their proposed bills, and occasionally outright banned women from their galleries. The few legislators who went on record in support of young ages of consent voiced sympathy for hypothetical men who would be ensnared into marriage by conniving girls who consented to sex and later threatened to press charges. Nevertheless, by 1890, the WCTU and their allies in the labor and populist movements had succeeded in raising the age of consent to 14 or 16 in several states. This marked significant progress, but women advocates still wanted to raise it to 18.
Reformers lamented the challenges of directing public attention to this ongoing outrage, especially when respectable women were not supposed to talk about sex. In 1895, Willard forged an unlikely alliance with the “freethinking” (atheist or agnostic) feminist Helen Hamilton Gardener, who made raising the age of consent her focus in the 1890s. Though hardly anyone—least of all Willard—knew it, Gardener herself was a “fallen woman” who had moved and changed her name when she was 23 after Ohio newspapers publicized her affair with a married man. Feeling constrained by nonfiction and the Comstock Laws (which prohibited the publication or transmission of any “obscene” material), Gardener turned to fiction to dramatize the dire consequences of sexual assault and spur a complacent public to action. After the publication of her two novels, Is This Your Son, My Lord? (1890) and Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter? (1892), Gardener became known as “The Harriet Beecher Stowe of Fallen Women.”
While Gardener and Willard disagreed on religion and temperance, they agreed that men and women should abide by the same standard of sexual behavior. Gardener vigorously opposed the efforts of several states to weaken their statutory rape laws by including clauses stipulating that the law only applied to girls who could prove that they had been virgins at the time of their assault.
In addition to her novels, Gardener used her position as an editor of the liberal Arena magazine to promote age-of-consent reform. She chronicled reformers’ efforts, included detailed legislative reports and vote tallies from every state, and even published a “black list” of states that had not yet raised the age of consent above 14. She directed readers to write the nearly 9,000 state legislators in the country to ask their position on the age of consent, and she sent copies of her novels to lawmakers in states where age-of-consent legislation was pending. By 1900, 32 states had raised the age to between 14 and 18.
But most Southern state legislatures refused to budge. For years, black women—including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Ida B. Wells—had called attention to the fact that white men used rape as a tool of white supremacy. For a brief period before 1900, white women worked together with African American women, mainly in the WCTU, to revise age of consent laws. Before they were disenfranchised and forced out of office after Reconstruction, African American male legislators in the South also advanced legislation to raise the age of consent.
White Southern lawmakers stridently opposed revised age-of-consent laws because they did not want black women to be able to charge white men with a crime. Kentucky state representative A. C. Tompkins went on record with his opposition, explaining, “We see at once what a terrible weapon for evil the elevating of the age of consent would be when placed in the hands of a lecherous, sensual negro woman,” insinuating that black women, who he claimed matured earlier and had a more sexual nature, would seduce men and then accuse them of assault. But, as the historian Leslie K. Dunlap has documented, white legislators did pass new rape laws that allowed for brutal punishments, including castration, because these laws targeted black men and were used to justify lynching and disenfranchisement. Thanks to the lobbying of the WCTU, most Southern states raised the age of consent to 13 or 14, but these laws fell far short of reformers’ goals, as they generally pertained only to white girls and those who could prove they were virgins at the time.
These uphill campaigns proved to the activists, many of whom had not before been ardent suffragists, that women needed the vote and a voice in the legislatures. As the pioneering physician Emily Blackwell noted, opponents of women’s suffrage insisted that “men are always ready to remove any proved injustice to [women]. Yet the fact remains that the first states to raise the age of consent to that of majority [18], were those in which women had a direct voice in politics–Wyoming and Kansas.” In the 1880s, many of the WCTU’s thousands of members had stopped short of demanding the vote. By the end of the century, however, the unified and vocal support of the WCTU helped transform women’s suffrage into a mainstream movement.
As the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s (NAWSA) lead negotiator in Washington, Helen Hamilton Gardener went on to use the strategies she learned in lobbying to raise the age of consent to get the 19th Amendment through Congress: Apply pressure through the media, enlist legislators’ wives and daughters, build personal relationships with men in office and never underestimate the power of white Southern intransigence.
While the Colorado Senate would water down Rep. Holly’s bill (the final version raised the age to 18), NAWSA members celebrated this historic legislation at their annual meeting, and Susan B. Anthony sent Holly a warm letter of congratulations. Women then watched as this pattern of enfranchisement and new policies repeated itself in state after state. Two years after women gained the vote in California in 1911, for example, lawmakers raised the age of consent to 18 and increased prison sentences for rapists. The message was clear: Women voting meant women having a say over what happened to their bodies.
Suffrage organizations, smaller and eager to appear mainstream, were less likely than the WCTU to openly champion age-of-consent reform (though individual chapters did help with petition drives), but the rights to “self-ownership” and “voluntary motherhood” remained fundamental goals, as historians Lauren MacIvor Thompson and Heather Munro Prescott have shown. They believed that women voters would usher in a new age of politics in which the needs of women and children would be paramount. Unfortunately, suffragists never replicated the interracial coalition that had briefly worked together to raise the age of consent. Mainstream suffrage organizations, including NAWSA and the National Woman’s Party, discriminated against and cold-shouldered African American women, who worked for the vote through black women’s clubs, churches and civil rights organizations.
In the 100 years since the ratification of the 19th Amendment, age-of-consent laws have remained on the books (all states now set the age between 16 and 18), although the internet, child marriage and other workarounds undermine these standards. Subsequent generations of activists have succeeded in criminalizing marital rape, moving conversations about sexual assault away from victim-blaming, and introducing the concept of sexual harassment into employment laws.
Women won the vote, but the sexual double standard that 19th-century women fought against still persists and may well be patriarchy’s last, best tool. The age-of-consent campaigns that brought thousands of women into reform work and, ultimately, suffrage activism, show what is possible when women work together across racial, economic and ideological lines. Gardener and her colleagues longed for the day when women would be recognized as “self-respecting, self-directing human units with brains and bodies sacredly their own,” and the #MeToo movement carries on this long tradition of activism today.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-raising-age-sexual-consent-taught-women-about-vote-180975658/