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Carolyn Cocca notes at the outset of her book that she is interested not only in the nuts and bolts of morality policy but also in how the narratives about those policies circulate and justify, in this case, the regulation of sexuality. The book breaks ground in its sustained attention to an issue that has been insufficiently addressed by political scientists.
Cocca is interested in morality politics and the political battles and strategies with respect to statutory rape laws at the state level during the last 30 years, but she begins with a brief history of statutory rape laws in the United States. After a cursory review of the period prior to the twentieth century, she turns her attention to the two "waves" of feminist advocacy for reform: the effort early in the twentieth century to raise the age of consent, and the late-twentieth-century efforts to add age-span provisions and gender-neutral language. The first wave was fairly successful (though not without controversy), and most states raised the age of consent from the previous range of 10 to 12 years to 16 to 18 years. The second wave is the period that Cocca studies in more detail in the rest of the book.
As the author's...