Purity and sexual double standards

Purity and sexual double standards shape Esther Greenwood’s understanding of sex as both a moral boundary and a test of who is allowed to choose. The advice offered to her defines chastity as a woman’s duty while granting men greater latitude; Esther’s response is not simply to accept or reject that code, but to question why its risks and restrictions fall so unevenly. The idea develops from an abstract division between the sexually experienced and inexperienced into a practical concern with pregnancy, marriage, and freedom to direct one’s own life.

The Rules of Chastity

A magazine article titled “In Defense of Chastity,” which Esther’s mother had sent her in college, supplies a compact version of the prevailing rule. Its married author argues that men and women have different emotional worlds and that marriage is what properly joins them. The article presents a man’s wish to remain pure for his future wife as desirable, yet also assumes that an experienced man may teach his wife about sex. A woman who yields to a man’s persuasion, by contrast, is warned that he may lose respect for her and treat her as someone who would do the same with other men. Pregnancy is the article’s final practical threat: because there is no completely certain way to avoid having a baby, the reader is told to be safe rather than sorry.

The advice therefore combines moral instruction with a warning about material consequences. Esther recognizes that the argument accounts for what a man may want, what he may teach, and how he may judge a woman, but does not consider how the woman herself feels. Its promise of protection depends on a woman accepting a rule that leaves her sexual choices subject to male approval and her future vulnerable to pregnancy. The problem, as Esther frames it, is not simply that chastity is recommended. It is that the recommendation demands a single standard from women while permitting men a divided one.

Esther’s Challenge to the Double Standard

Buddy Willard’s confession that he is not sexually pure gives Esther a concrete reason to doubt the model she has been taught. She cannot accept a future in which a woman is expected to preserve a single, chaste life while a man may have both a pure and an experienced past. At nineteen, she describes purity as the great issue and imagines sexual experience as the boundary that most meaningfully divides people. The scale of that distinction reveals how powerfully the rule organizes her thinking, even as she begins to resist its unequal terms.

Her proposed answer is deliberately reciprocal: if a suitable intelligent man is unlikely to remain pure, she reasons that she might as well give up her own purity and marry someone who is not pure either; if he then makes her life miserable, she could make his miserable in return. The thought does not resolve the conflict or offer a stable alternative to marriage. Instead, it exposes the resentment built into a system in which men’s sexual histories are tolerated while women are expected to bear the consequences quietly. Esther imagines equality first as a refusal to accept a rule that applies only in one direction.

The force of the boundary also appears in her expectation that crossing it would transform her. She imagines returning from a visit to Europe with a tiny white Alpine peak visible in her eye; after sex, she expects to see a miniature image of Constantin there instead. These imagined marks make sexual experience seem at once momentous and legible, as though it must leave proof of a changed identity. The comparison conveys the intensity of Esther’s anticipation without confirming that the change she expects will occur in the way she imagines.

Desire, Risk, and the Body

Esther’s reflections take place against a real uncertainty: she knows she might become pregnant, but initially treats that possibility as remote. The article her mother sends her insists that no method offers complete certainty, making pregnancy the pressure behind its instruction to reserve sex for marriage. Esther’s account of these arguments emphasizes how the burden of risk falls on women. Chastity is presented as moral guidance, but the looming possibility of a baby also makes it a form of social control, one that can steer a woman toward marriage and constrain her choices.

The childbirth scene Esther witnesses with Buddy deepens this concern. She sees a woman in labor while Buddy explains that medication will make the woman forget the pain; Esther doubts that forgetting can undo what the woman has experienced or the prospect that she may face childbirth again. Her response connects the prescribed cycle of sex, pregnancy, and motherhood to bodily consequences that advice about chastity can treat as a cautionary abstraction. The contrast matters: a moral rule may speak in general terms, but the reproductive risk it invokes is endured by a particular woman.

Later, Esther tells Doctor Nolan that she hates the prospect of being under a man’s thumb and describes a baby as a threat that could keep her in line. Asked whether she would act differently if she did not have to worry about a baby, she answers yes, then explains the influence of the chastity article. This exchange makes explicit the connection between sexual convention and dependence that her earlier reflections had approached through irony and imagined reciprocity. Pregnancy is not merely a possible outcome; in Esther’s account, fear of it helps determine what a woman may dare to do.

Contraception and Practical Freedom

Esther’s visit to obtain a fitting turns the debate from ideas to action. She considers inventing a story about marrying a sailor, which would explain why she has no engagement ring, but abandons it and answers the doctor directly. As she climbs onto the examination table, she thinks of the fitting as a route to freedom: freedom from fear, from marrying the wrong person because of sex, and from institutions to which poor women may be sent after becoming pregnant. Her decision makes access to contraception a practical condition of sexual and marital choice, not merely a question of private preference.

The details of the visit also show how socially precarious that freedom feels. Esther returns to the institution with the fitting in a plain brown paper wrapper and gradually loses her suspicion that Catholics can see through it. She judges that she has made good use of her shopping privileges. The mundane disguise and the anxiety around being observed stand in contrast to the scale of the relief she associates with the purchase: gaining a means to avoid pregnancy changes the choices she believes she can make.

Significance

The concept of purity in Esther’s story is inseparable from the unequal allocation of sexual judgment and reproductive risk. The advice to remain chaste casts the man as a possible instructor and judge, while making a woman responsible for preserving respectability and avoiding pregnancy. Esther’s objections expose the gap between that moral language and women’s own feelings, ambitions, and bodily exposure.

Her response develops from satire of the double standard into a demand for practical autonomy. The idea of answering a man’s unequal freedom with reciprocal resentment reveals the anger the code produces; her later pursuit of contraception identifies a more consequential form of choice. Together, the episodes show why purity cannot be treated as a neutral personal virtue in the novel: under these conditions, it is a gendered rule with material effects on who can choose sex, marriage, and a life not organized around motherhood.