Apr 21, 2018 3 min read

The Mann Act, passed by Congress in 1910, making it a felony to transport across state lines “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose,” is probably our most famous law with respect to sexual predation. Many thousands of Americans, including many famous ones – Charlie Chaplin, Chuck Berry, Frank Lloyd Wright – have been prosecuted for it.

However, this week (April 22) in 1886, a quarter century before the Mann Act, the state of Ohio passed a statute that made unlawful the simple act of a man having sex with a woman not his wife, which most Ohioans considered to be seduction.

The law was passed in response to the growing number of male teachers who were using their positions of influence over women students to take sexual advantage of them (swapping sex for higher grades was obviously a concern), and so the law covered “all men over the age of 18 who worked as teachers or instructors of women.” The penalty was two to 10 years in prison.

Ohio wasn’t the only state to pass laws against this seduction masquerading as consensual sex. In New York, laws against seduction specifically addressed the age-old habit of young men persuading gullible young women to have sex with them on the promise that they would marry the women. New York’s law made it illegal to “under promise of marriage, seduce any unmarried female of previous chaste (chaste meaning virginal) character.” Under that same promise of marriage, the state legislature in Georgia passed a law against seduction that made it illegal for men to “seduce a virtuous unmarried female and induce her to yield to his lustful embraces, and allow him to have carnal knowledge of her.”

In Virginia, if the sex was conditional on a promise of marriage, it was illegal to have an “illicit connexion (sic) with any unmarried female of previous chaste character.”

That said, ironically – or perhaps fittingly – women would sometimes use these laws to force men to marry them. In 1867, a man about to be convicted of violating the New York law against “sex with the promise of marriage” hastily proposed to the woman during the trial, whereupon a minister was summoned, and the courtroom became a wedding chapel. And the charges were dropped.

Perhaps the most interesting, even somewhat amusing, example of this legal movement against seduction occurred in Michigan, where a man was convicted on three counts of seducing the same woman. In their successful appeal, the defendant’s attorneys had the latter two convictions overturned on the grounds that, after their first sexual encounter, the woman was no longer considered “virtuous” or “chaste.”

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s e-mail address is bruce@historylessons.net.