Unpopular opinion - The caricature of Victorian women as frigid sex-hating prudes is a lingering backlash to the intersectional anti-rape movements started by Victorian women.

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Abolitionists were among the most successful political organizers. Beginning about the 1830s, abolitionist women circulated newsletters, imagery, novels and memoirs centering the sexual victimization of enslaved women. Some, including former slaves, lectured internationally.

Only one faction of this era's abolitionists supported women lecturing publicly and writing on sexual violence - but they were influential. Lincoln credited Harriet Beecher Stowe and her brother (both of whom dramatized sexual violence narratives) for sparking the U.S. civil war.

A few decades after this anti-rape abolitionost movement took root in the U.S., Josephine Butler (the daughter of English abolitionists), led a crusade against the Contagious Disease Acts that took issue with compulsory brothel systems and state-mandated vaginal exams for S.W.'s.

It was specifically the sexual violence that alarmed her, and she referred to compulsory vaginal exams as sexual assault.

After her death and in the Progressive years Butler's movement as well as the anti-slavery movement would be appropriated by anti-sex-work "abolitionists." But Victorian Josephine was actually an early advocate of decriminalization, fearing any regulation would only burden women.

And, as with U.S. abolitionist activism, Butler's organizing proved shockingly successful. England's Contagious Disease Acts, which allowed cops to quarantine any woman suspected of being a sex-worker, were repealed.

Another shockingly successful anti-rape initiative led by Victorian women was the international effort to increase age-of-consent. Women organizers all through the Victorian era fought to increase age-of-consent, gradually achieving more and more victories.

In the U.S., resistance to increasing the age of consent was greatest after the Civil War in former confederate states - not by coincidence. White supremacists determined to flip the abolitionist script were working to redefine rape as something black men did to white women.

Age-of-consent activism didn't exclusively target black men so the two narratives were not allowed to coexist. The same newspapers that hungered for stories of black men raping white women chastised the women who wrote and spoke in favor of increasing age of consent as indecent.

Less successfully, some Victorian activists agitated for divorce law following international attention to a number of shocking cases in which estranged husbands abducted and raped their wives.

This fed a free love movement advocating marital law reform and decriminalized birth control, which gained enough traction that Victoria Woodhull used it in her platform when she ran for president with Frederick Douglass as running mate.

This is not to imply that Victorian activism didn't privilege women who were white, bougeoise, and single or happily married with no sex worker experience. But the coalitions that formed and the issues they centered during the Victorian era were important intersectional efforts.

Most shocking of all is how successful Victorian organizers were, considering most of them couldn't even vote. The power of activism ignored by the state brought about a war that ended slavery. And it scared the shit out of some people.

White supremacists soon began courting white women's attention, offering them the vote if they'd abandon the coalitions that brought white supremacy to its knees. White feminism ended one of the most successful eras of women's activism.

When people talk about the women's movement coming in waves, they're referring not to waves of awareness or activism, but waves of success. After winning the vote for white women, white feminism having abandoned black women, immigrants and S.W.'s, lost its driving force.

I think the way we are taught to think of Victorians is an erasure of the power of intersectional activism. It is particularly an erasure of anti-rape activism, allowing abusers to imply rape is a modern invention that never mattered to anyone before us sensitive snowflakes.

Not by coincidence were we smeared as the #MeToo movement gained traction with words like "prude" and "Victorian." If it worked to erase them, it can work to erase us, too.