OMNINO Undergraduate Research Journal

OM NINO “A community of scholars” Volume 1 2010-11 Undergraduate Research Journal VALDOSTA STATE UNIVERSITY STATE VALDOSTA OM NINO Undergraduate Research Journal Volume 1 2010-11 Valdosta State University 2011 Faculty Advisor Nathan R. Elliott Editors Amanda Bissonnette Daniel Block R. Paul Brannon Chelsea Ellis Meredith McDonald Jessica Nesmith Khristian Roberts Matia Wright Yvonne Wright Designers Chad Stone Dorsena Drakeford Stephanie Turner Copyright © 2011 by Valdosta State University OMNINO Undergraduate Research Journal Volume 1, Number 1 2010-11 "A Proposition Which Is Both Contemptible and Rude”: Middle-Class Domesticity, Male Prerogative, and Male Resistance to the Elevation of the Age of Consent in the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 3 by Bill Gay Predicting Democratization Across the Globe 25 by Bruce George Genetic Enhancement of Human Memory and Cognition 39 by Chelsie Norton Marriage Makes a Man: Masculinity and Miscegenation in Nineteenth Century America 53 by Dallas Suttles The Sublime in Frankenstein 67 by Emily Conheady Morgan le Fay: From Goddess to Villain 77 by Kaci West 2009 Federal Spending for the 50 States 87 by Katie Wagnon Society’s Viewpoint and its Effect on Interracial Couples 105 by Kenneth Kelly Adhering to the Same Ethics in the Age of Social Net- working 113 by Sara Lynn McCall Georgia’s Gratuitous General Electoral Laws: A Superfluous Senatorial Runoff in 2008 123 by Tyler Moore The Submerged Tenth:American Eugenics & German Racial Hygiene in the Early 20th Century 143 by W. Jake Newsome Contributor’s Notes 168 Acknowledgements The Editorial Board of Omnino wishes to thank all of the students who submitted articles to the journal. We also wish to thank those anonymous faculty members who generously gave their time to review student contributions. We would also like to thank Pat Miller’s staff for designing the layout and logo, including (insert names here?). Thanks to Pat Miller and Jane Kinney for conceiving of this project, and to James LaPlant and Louis Levy for their generous support, including making the issue available in print. We would like to thank Marilu Wentworth and her staff at Wiregrass Georgia Technical College for printing Omnino. Editorial Note The editorial board made a number of decisions that the general reader should be aware of when reading this inaugural issue of Omnino. We took our title from the Latin word for all together or wholly; we felt that this best symbolized the interdisciplinary nature of the journal and the community of Valdosta State University Scholars that we wanted to help create. How- ever, bringing together a number of different disciplines created chal- lenges of its own. Citation styles in this article will vary from article to article. MLA, APA, and the Chicago style are all represented, and variations on the Chicago style are also represented. We felt that it was better to let contributors cite their material according to their discipline specific needs, rather than forcing a false unity on the articles. We strove to find articles that contributed something to their discipline, in the best tradition of university research. With that in mind, we sent all of our contributions to faculty members for peer review and attempted to find readers from more than one discipline whenever an article proved to have an interdisciplinary subject or approach. Often we received mixed and conflicting reports from our readers, and at other times we received requests for the contributors to further improve their article. We often had to make tough editorial decisions based on the reports of our faculty readers. As a result, we had to cut articles that we thought showed genuine promise. We want to thank those students who contributed, even if they were not ultimately selected for this issue. 1 2 “A Proposition Which Is Both Contemptible and Rude”: Middle-Class Domesticity, Male Prerogative, and Male Resistance to the Elevation of the Age of Consent in the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 by William Gay ABSTRACT: Over the latter half of the nineteenth century, Victorian society took an interest in the common morality. Chief amongst these moral concerns was sex. In the 1870s and particularly the 1880s, reformists placed sufficient political pressure on Parliament to pass new laws elevating the age of consent for girls. These laws challenged the notions of manliness which manifested largely in sexual activity and in the home. Backlash from the middle- and upper-class only increased in the 1880s, effectively stopping legislation for a half-decade. The Pall Mall Gazette’s graphic exposé on child rape, child prostitution and white slavery prodded the stymied Parliament to legislative action. n August 9, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 became law in Britain. The Act attempted to regulate Victorian sexuality by rais- Oing the age of consent and creating harsher penalties within the law for sexual assault and rape. The passage of the law was the result of intractable social activism by women’s groups, social purity reformers, evangelicals, policemen, and journalists. Parliament’s passage of the Act stood as a triumphant symbol of their collective, if fragmented, effort and a testament to the growing power of middle-class values. For men, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 evoked mixed responses. While some sided with the social purist reformers, others argued vehemently against raising the age of consent. These men feared that in raising the age of consent, revising penalties for rape, and debating sexual topics in a public setting, men would lose their sexual and social advantage. The male detractors of the Criminal Law Amendment Act made the passage of the bill as much an issue of preserving masculine prerogative, as an issue of protecting young girls. Historians have mostly viewed the public debates on sex which pro- duced the Criminal Law Amendment Act by studying women, childhood, 3 A Proposition Which is Both Contemptible and Rude prostitution and masculine homosexuality. The study of masculinity during the same period intersects with only some of these ideas. Any discourse on Victorian-era prostitution must begin with Judith Walkowitz’s monu- mental volume, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State in which she established Victorian-era prostitution, Victorian sexual conduct, and the societal relationship between the two as legitimate topics of historical study. Michael Pearson’s The Age of Consent and Its En- emies and The £5 Virgins were first to thoroughly examine the age of consent campaigns. Pearson examined the political and evangelical reform movements con- tributing to W.T. Stead’s investigation and expository serial, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” and the subsequent passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885. Pearson overestimated the importance of Stead and his work in moving the Criminal Law Amendment forward, and failed to adequately consider the political opposition outside George Cavendish-Bentinck, Conservative MP from Whitehaven.1 The emphasis on Stead’s highly public role led to evaluations of the historical context of Stead’s cause. Debrah Gorham’s “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon Revisited: Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late Victorian England” connected the male opposition to the elevation of the age of consent as a primary cause of anger and consolidation amongst middle-class reformers such as W.T. Stead. In City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, Judith Walkowitz examined the transition in urban sexual danger from the 1860s to the 1880s including the ways in which women entered the public debates on sex and prostitution. Among these discussions of public debates is the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885, which Walkowitz demonstrates tied directly into purity reform movements, prostitution, child-prostitution, and urban spectatorship.2 In recent years, renewed interest in W.T. Stead’s works and investigatory journalism, including the “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” has led to the publication of several compilations of Stead’s works. Antony Simpson forwarded his edition, simply entitled The Maiden Tribute of Mod- ern Babylon, with an essay which placed W.T. Stead’s exposé in a long line of morally proscriptive writing. The societal perception of prostitution as a problem was antiquated, Simpson believes, but Stead’s published announcement that children were at times active participants shocked society-at-large. To Simpson, Stead’s large circulation and risqué journalism was instrumental in moving the age of consent legislation forward, but not the sole determinant.3 Historians have found the studies of Victorian masculinity much more challenging. Most historical commentaries on late-Victorian masculinity focus on imperialism. Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity 4 William Gay in Britain and America 1800-1940, edited by J.A. Mangan and James Walvin, compared the creation of British and American middle-class mas- culinities. In Britain, masculinity was heavily modified by Christian princi- ples and connected innately to the freedom the British Empire provided. In “Reimagining Masculinity in Victorian Criticism: Swinburne and Pater,” Thaïs E Morgan examined the late-nineteenth century as a literary driven epoch of competing interpretations of masculinity. The work of historian John Tosh has proved to be central to the analysis of Victorian masculinity. In a series of articles culminating in A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, Tosh argued that late-Victorian masculinity was intricately related to the home, the family, and the con- struction of manly fraternity.4 During the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution prompted Britons to envision the middle class, and middle-class values, to be the center of British society. Prominent amongst the new middle-class value system was a newly constructed def- inition of domestic roles.

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