In this final episode of Pure White analyses how myths of white women’s innocence are deployed to demonstrate national innocence. The events of January 6, 2020 included several white women who willfully disobeyed the law. When arrested, many cl

Episode 7: Purity Culture and Welfare Reform

Jan 8th, 2024 24m 37s

This episode examines how the True Love Waits and the Southern Baptist church influenced Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform bill with an amendment that created funding for abstinence-only education. This pairing demonstrates how myths about sexual p

Episode 6: True Love Waits and Sexual Accountability

Jan 1st, 2024 36m 44s

This episode focuses on the organization True Love Waits and its founding as a highly ambitious campaign to transform the diversity of sexual cultures, expressions, and ethics in the US into a singular ethic based on Christian principles. While

Episode 5: Myths of Sexual Danger

Dec 22nd, 2023 31m 46s

Emmett Till. Lionel Richie. The Atlanta Massacre. This episode looks at how the legacy of lynching remains active in the promotion of myths of sexual danger which even today promote white women’s sexual purity and racial innocence. It examines

Episode 4: White Women and the Lynching Myth

Dec 18th, 2023 26m 13s

This episode is named after an especially violent time in US history immediately following Reconstruction in the US South. Frequent racial-terror lynchings were justified by what journalist Ida B. Wells called the lynching myth. The myth was r

Episode 3: True Womanhood

Dec 18th, 2023 24m

First coined by US gender historian Barbara Welter, the cult of true womanhood is a concept that describes Victorian gender ideologies of the 19th century cultural elite. An analysis of these ideals reveals efforts by white Protestants to creat

Episode 1: Prelude to a Reckoning

Dec 11th, 2023 16m 37s

What happens when you link national renewal to the sexual lives of teenagers? This is exactly what evangelical purity culture did in the 1990s. In this first episode, host Dr. Sara Moslener recounts the history and details of purity culture's a

Episode 2: Purity is for the Free

Dec 11th, 2023 20m 3s

What can an enslaved woman's memoir teach us about the history of purity culture and White supremacy?The history of sexual purity is deeply intertwined with the history of race in the US. Specifically, it tells us a great deal about how the rac