Postpartum as a site of sexual script renegotiation and intensification among women socialised within purity culture

Feb 19, 2026

Abstract: This interview study examined how postpartum women socialised within the Purity Culture Movement (PCM) in the USA navigated inherited sexual scripts during the transition to motherhood. Purity Culture, a religious system emphasising premarital abstinence, modesty, and sexual obligation within marriage, is widely associated with sexual shame and relational strain. Less is known about how women rework these beliefs after childbirth. Fifteen postpartum women were recruited from faith-informed maternal communities across the USA and screened to include those reporting either high or low sexual satisfaction. Interviews were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis within an interpretive feminist framework. Four processes were identified through which purity-based meanings were destabilised, renegotiated, or intensified. Bodily change, sexual pain, marital communication, and faith-based reinterpretation were key sites of negotiation. Women described moral responsibility, distance from their own desire and silence about sexual health, alongside embodied reclamation, shared rewriting of sexual scripts and greater flexibility in belief. Relational safety, access to clinical language and care, and theological flexibility distinguished renegotiation from intensification. Postpartum emerged as a bifurcated life-stage in which inherited religious sexual scripts may be reinforced or remade, with implications for culturally responsive sexual healthcare and for scholarship on religion and sexuality.