History of Feminism

While parents can’t be there to directly supervise budding romances, the Patrick Henry administration can be trusted as a surrogate. If, for example, a couple is seen doing much of anything beyond a quick kiss, R.A.s might e-mail or talk to them individually. Like it or not, the rules are in place for the students’ own good. A passage in the Student Honor Code reads: “I pledge, by the grace of God, to submit to proper authorities.”

The self-policing that courtship culture requires, however, is not egalitarian. Responsibility falls disproportionately to women, who are taught to protect their “purity” and to never “tempt” their brothers in Christ to “stumble” with immodest behavior. “The lack of men’s responsibility or culpability for their own actions and the acceptance of male ‘urges’ as irresistible forces of nature is the understructure of Christian modesty movements and their secular counterpart,” the journalist Kathryn Joyce wrote in Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. These movements, she noted, see “women’s bodies as almost supernaturally perverse and corrupting.”