Suspect Citizens: Women, Virtue, and Vice in Backlash Politics

3 | “Back to Virtue” Backlash Politics: Privileging Irresponsibility

W omen’s moral character, whether at the turn of the nineteenth or twenty-first century, represents a site of struggle in “family values” debates, a feature of “back to virtue” backlash politics. Following the American Revolution, women’s education moved into the national spotlight at the beginning of the nineteenth century as political leaders attempted to hold together the fledgling republic ’s fragile coalition of independent states. Challenges to the traditional family structure threatened to undermine the nation’s patriarchal order.1 American men increasingly avoided marriage. American women left farms for cities and wage-paying jobs, married later, exercised more choice in their marital decisions, and gave birth to fewer children. Female virtue assumed prominence in the political discourse as a way to mend the nation’s fraying moral and civic fabric. “Women became the keepers of the nation’s conscience,” Mary Beth Norton explains, “the only citizens specifically charged with maintaining the traditional republican commitment to the good of the entire community.”2 Assuming this double burden of moral responsibility, most agreed, required that women gain access to enough formal education to acquire the reason necessary for cultivating a civic counterpart to their moral virtue. 3 | “Back to Virtue” Backlash Politics Privileging Irresponsibility 66 | chapter 3 National debate about women’s education and its impact on the traditional patriarchal family ensued. Reformers such as Benjamin Rush and Judith Sargent Murray advocated for women’s increased access to a broader education that would better enable them to serve the republic as wives and mothers and to raise its future male citizens. Opponents to these measures such as Reverends James Fordyce and John Bennett feared that a more rigorous curriculum would “unsex” women, deprive them of their “softer” nature, and distract them from their domestic duties . This republican era “family values” debate tracks how civic virtue shifts from the male public to female private life and defines women’s explicit relationship to politics as moral guardians but suspect citizens. The ongoing debates over sex education today illustrate how the virtue-vice dualism channels old oppressions from the republican era into contemporary backlash politics. The comprehensive approach to sex education, defended by organizations such as Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), Advocates for Youth, and Planned Parenthood, includes information about reproduction and contraceptives while still promoting abstinence as the best choice for young people. Conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Medical Institute, and Focus on the Family advocate for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs as the only way to address the fact that U.S. teen birth, abortion, and sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates rank among the highest in the developed world.3 Curricula for these abstinence-only programs teach young men and women to stand against the vice-ridden dominant culture of sexual promiscuity by exhibiting courage to embrace the virtues of sexual purity, modesty, and chastity. The Heritage Keepers: Abstinence Education curriculum links these moral virtues with the civic ideals on which Americans founded an exceptional nation. Early Americans “built a land full of opportunity with ideals that would eventually inspire the world,” the Heritage Keepers manual reads. “Today, we have the privilege of living in America. . . . A Heritage Keeper understands this privilege—they strive to preserve what they have been given and build upon it.”4 The message of abstinence, drawing on the nation’s Puritan moral legacy and American exceptionalism, resonated loudly enough with the people and politicians to make it the primary approach to sex education policy from the mid-1990s into the mid-2000s.5 “Back to Virtue” Backlash Politics  | 67 President Obama’s administration swung the pendulum back again by dropping all funds for abstinence-only programs from its 2010 federal budget and overturning the “global gag rule” that banned the distribution of federal funds to foreign nongovernmental family planning organizations that offer information other than about abstinence. Such cyclical policy shifts characterize backlash politics, which reach beyond conservative forces focused on protecting certain moral traditions and lock national debates into a gendered moral logic framed by virtue and vice. Relating the contemporary debate over sex education to the early republican debate over women’s education illustrates how the dualistic logic of virtue and vice perpetuates backlashes in a democratic politics held hostage by the ideals of purity, chastity, and modesty. The early republican debate indicates how women’s moral guardianship translates into their double...