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Social hygiene reform developed in the 1910s from the coalescence of the religious social purity movement and the more scientifically inclined antivenereal disease movement. Social hygienists, many of them physicians, claimed science rather than morality as the basis of their proposals. They promoted conservative sex education that sustained Victorian ideas of gender segregation and difference and idealized motherhood and marriage. Nevertheless, they challenged public reticence about sexuality because they believed prostitution and venereal disease represented so great a social threat that ignorance could no longer be tolerated. Sex education programs provided opportunity for some white women to articulate and criticize men's power and sexual freedom. African American participants promoted better sexual health for blacks and challenged racist understandings of venereal disease.

Chapter 1 examines the liberal Protestant roots of the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA), a clearinghouse for the early sex education movement. ASHA emerged from the combination of two distinct movements: social purity and social hygiene. Liberal Protestantism came to influence sex education through the merging of these strands and the collective realization that scientific information was not enough to influence sexual behavior. This chapter locates the roots of ASHA in social purity groups of the 1870s, many of which were led by Unitarians and Quakers and focused on ridding society of prostitution. The chapter explores their evolving relationship with the physician-dominated social hygiene movement that began in the early twentieth century, demonstrating that liberal religious concerns about sexual morality impacted sex education through the dynamic interactions between purity reformers and social hygienists. ASHA became the organization within which both groups developed a joint strategy for teaching the moral side of sex.

This chapter demonstrates that radical political movements on left and right invested even more heavily — rhetorically and pragmatically — in the mobilizing potential of sport and physical culture in the heightened atmosphere of crisis in the mid- to late 1930s. Distinctions between mass politics and mass (physical) culture often collapsed entirely as sports stadia were used across the political spectrum as sites for mass political expression. A considerable part of this chapter is devoted to the highly significant but under-researched sport and physical education society (SPES) in the radical rightist Croix de Feu/PSF. Here and elsewhere the chapter interrogates not only how such movements continued to use athletic manliness as a tool of popular political mobilization, but also how far these factions themselves took part in the public conversation about male bodily decline, biological degeneration, and its correction through socially hygienic physical exercise.

This chapter describes how the BCG vaccine became a technopolitical weapon in an empire divided between social hygienist and Pastorian interventionist approaches to public health. Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin’s vaccine came under attack in Europe, particularly after a batch of contaminated vaccines killed dozens of infants in Lübeck, Germany. Deploying the vaccine in the empire helped Pastorians to strengthen their claims of the vaccine’s safety and respond to critics at the League of Nations. For imperial administrators, BCG was a cheaper alternative to social hygienist solutions such as shorter working hours, vacations, and sanatoriums, which Vietnamese doctors increasingly suggested. The chapter also highlights the importance of the Rockefeller wartime mission to France.

Bio-political regulation and its limits is the major topic of chapter 3, addressing intimacy and the transnational circulation of knowledge in the control of venereal disease. Two major regulatory tools implemented by the occupiers are at the center of this chapter: venereal disease contact tracing and prophylactic stations. Their analysis uncovers that the contact tracing system, although medically ineffective, helped the occupiers to measure, quantify, and map occupied Japan and its people—and simultaneously to maintain their internal color line by distinguishing venereal infection rates between white and black servicemen. Prophylactic stations, in which servicemen were compelled to clean and protect themselves after sexual exposure, enable insights into the most private spaces of servicemen’s lives.

This chapter examines the ways AIDS discourse has formed in the media and popular culture in the Philippines to produce a sense of sexual difference identical to moral and physical danger. It analyzes “the medico-moral hegemony” that is produced and reproduced at the level of collective representations, and which shapes the response to AIDS not only by far-right conservative groups, but also by government and even many non-governmental AIDS-service organizations. The chapter suggests that most HIV prevention campaigns in the Philippines have been based on longstanding and very problematic models of “social hygiene” that structure the reaction of the public health system to notions of sexual diversity and difference.

This chapter examines Fascism's archaeological interventions in Benito Mussolini's Rome from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. Focusing on a number of archaeological excavations and urban planning projects, it considers the ways in which the spatial relationship between antiquity and modernity in the Eternal City was envisioned by scholars, city planners, and the political leadership. In particular, it discusses the regime's attempts to recast archaeology from an instrument for recovering the past to a vehicle of urban modernization, a remedy for crises in social hygiene, unemployment, and demography. In this context, the excavation of ancient Roman sites played an important role in the creation of a modern capital for Fascist Italy. The chapter also assesses the regime's attitude toward the spaces of “old Rome,” the parochial city that would be cleared to make way for Roma Mussolinea. Finally, it highlights the ways that new urban realities helped reinforce and further elaborate romanità as a central tenet of Fascist ideology.

This chapter introduces the ways religion contributed to the major agendas that defined the five historical phases of sex education. The phases include (1) the formation of the early sex education movement out of purity and hygiene movements between 1876 and 1913; (2) the institutionalization of moral education as part of venereal disease prevention programs in schools, YMCAs (Young Men’s Christian Associations), and the military between 1913 and 1925; (3) the shift to family life education between 1925 and 1964; (4) the development of comprehensive sexuality education between 1964 and 1981; and (5) the growth of abstinence-only programs from 1981 to the present. These phases were dominated by organizations like the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) and the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). Religion was prominent in the motivations of the organizations’ founders, the participation of religious sex educators, cooperation with churches and synagogues, and discussions within publications and conferences.

The period saw a reconfiguration of scholarly discourses about the nation. Historiography was significantly transformed, assimilating both criticism of the Romantic idealization of the past and a wave of neo-Romantic narratives. This shift was accompanied by the consolidation of the discipline of sociology. A sociological frame of thought came to underpin many discourses of political reform. With the rapid entry of the masses into politics, social sciences seemed to have a special mission to provide an understanding of the world. The connection of art with national spirit was widely debated, and the idea of a national style gained prominence. The aesthetic take on modernity influenced national self-representation and thus reflected, and even shaped, political discussion. Linked also to this modernist frame of mind, the voice of the women’s movement was increasingly heard in political debates on themes including but not limited to suffrage, education, nationalism, and social hygiene.