Christina Simmons
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195064117
- eISBN:
- 9780199869565
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195064117.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century, Social History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Christina Simmons
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195064117
- eISBN:
- 9780199869565
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195064117.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century, Social History
As a modern female style undermined a Victorian motherhood‐centered ideal, whites and African Americans debated conceptions of women's sexuality and marriage. In the 1910s social hygiene reformers ...
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As a modern female style undermined a Victorian motherhood‐centered ideal, whites and African Americans debated conceptions of women's sexuality and marriage. In the 1910s social hygiene reformers anxious about venereal disease called for scientific sex education but still romanticized motherhood, while sex radicals demanded birth control, free love, or the right to interracial relationships or homosexuality. The book emphasizes more conventional reformers, who by the 1920s hoped to contain the potential for modern women's independence from men and marriage in “companionate marriage.” This incorporated birth control, easier divorce, and intensified sexual intimacy. The most popular version involved free‐spirited flappers who did not seriously challenge male authority or women's ultimate focus on motherhood. Some more equitable minority versions were African American partnership marriage, which included wives' employment, and feminist marriage, in which white and black women imagined a more thoroughgoing equality of work and sex. Sexual advice literature flooded onto the market in the 1930s, offering women conflicting messages about achieving sexual pleasure but also pleasing husbands. Despite the unsettling of an older femininity, deep and persistent structural inequalities between men and women limited efforts to create gender parity in sex and marriage. Yet these cultural battles subverted patriarchal culture and raised women's expectations of marriage in ways that grounded second‐wave feminist claims.Less
As a modern female style undermined a Victorian motherhood‐centered ideal, whites and African Americans debated conceptions of women's sexuality and marriage. In the 1910s social hygiene reformers anxious about venereal disease called for scientific sex education but still romanticized motherhood, while sex radicals demanded birth control, free love, or the right to interracial relationships or homosexuality. The book emphasizes more conventional reformers, who by the 1920s hoped to contain the potential for modern women's independence from men and marriage in “companionate marriage.” This incorporated birth control, easier divorce, and intensified sexual intimacy. The most popular version involved free‐spirited flappers who did not seriously challenge male authority or women's ultimate focus on motherhood. Some more equitable minority versions were African American partnership marriage, which included wives' employment, and feminist marriage, in which white and black women imagined a more thoroughgoing equality of work and sex. Sexual advice literature flooded onto the market in the 1930s, offering women conflicting messages about achieving sexual pleasure but also pleasing husbands. Despite the unsettling of an older femininity, deep and persistent structural inequalities between men and women limited efforts to create gender parity in sex and marriage. Yet these cultural battles subverted patriarchal culture and raised women's expectations of marriage in ways that grounded second‐wave feminist claims.
Kristy L. Slominski
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780190842178
- eISBN:
- 9780190842208
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190842178.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Joan Tumblety
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199695577
- eISBN:
- 9780191745072
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695577.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History, Cultural History
This book is about interwar physical culture as a set of popular practices and as a field of ideas. It takes as its central subject the imagined failure of French manhood that was mapped out in this ...
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This book is about interwar physical culture as a set of popular practices and as a field of ideas. It takes as its central subject the imagined failure of French manhood that was mapped out in this realm by physical culturist ‘experts’, often physicians. Their diagnosis of intertwined crises in masculine virility and national vitality was surprisingly widely shared across popular and political culture. Theirs was a hygienist and sometimes overtly eugenicist conception of physical exercise and national strength that suggests the persistence of fin-de-siècle preoccupations with biological degeneration and regeneration well beyond the First World War. The book traces these patterns of thinking about the male body across a seemingly disparate set of voices, all of whom argued that the physical training of men offered a salve to France's real and imagined woes. In interrogating a range of sources, from get-fit manuals and the popular press, to the mobilizing campaigns of popular politics on left and right and official debates about physical education, the book illustrates how the realm of male physical culture could be presented as an instrument of social hygiene as well as an instrument of political struggle. In highlighting the purchase of these concerns in the interwar years, the book ultimately sheds light on the roots of Vichy's project for masculine regeneration after the military defeat of 1940.Less
This book is about interwar physical culture as a set of popular practices and as a field of ideas. It takes as its central subject the imagined failure of French manhood that was mapped out in this realm by physical culturist ‘experts’, often physicians. Their diagnosis of intertwined crises in masculine virility and national vitality was surprisingly widely shared across popular and political culture. Theirs was a hygienist and sometimes overtly eugenicist conception of physical exercise and national strength that suggests the persistence of fin-de-siècle preoccupations with biological degeneration and regeneration well beyond the First World War. The book traces these patterns of thinking about the male body across a seemingly disparate set of voices, all of whom argued that the physical training of men offered a salve to France's real and imagined woes. In interrogating a range of sources, from get-fit manuals and the popular press, to the mobilizing campaigns of popular politics on left and right and official debates about physical education, the book illustrates how the realm of male physical culture could be presented as an instrument of social hygiene as well as an instrument of political struggle. In highlighting the purchase of these concerns in the interwar years, the book ultimately sheds light on the roots of Vichy's project for masculine regeneration after the military defeat of 1940.
Joan Tumblety
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199695577
- eISBN:
- 9780191745072
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695577.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History, Cultural History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Aro Velmet
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190072827
- eISBN:
- 9780190072858
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190072827.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Robert Kramm
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520295971
- eISBN:
- 9780520968691
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520295971.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Richard Parker, Regina Maria Barbosa, and Peter Aggleton
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520218369
- eISBN:
- 9780520922754
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520218369.003.0008
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Medical Anthropology
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Joshua Arthurs
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801449987
- eISBN:
- 9780801468841
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801449987.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Kristy L. Slominski
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780190842178
- eISBN:
- 9780190842208
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190842178.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Balázs Trencsényi, Maciej Janowski, Mónika Baár, Maria Falina, and Michal Kopeček
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- April 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198737148
- eISBN:
- 9780191800610
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198737148.003.0014
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.