MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

One of the major topics that has been widely addressed by historians of sexuality is sexual education, including both what children learned and how information was conveyed to them. Many projects on sexual education have focused on a more formalized system of education that was found in public schools starting as early as the 1930s. However, this paper looks to an earlier period to interrogate how youths learned about sexuality, their bodies, and what society expected of them. In the early decades of the twentieth century, a conversation arose among physicians, teachers, parents, and others about children’s education on the matters of health and sexuality, which is reflected in an outpouring of publications addressed to young men and women on a variety of topics, from reproductive anatomy to “proper” relations between the sexes to prevention of venereal disease. Parents could be assured that, by handing them book or pamphlet, a child would receive the information needed to guide them through adolescence.

This paper considers four “sex hygiene” pamphlets published by the American Medical Association in 1913, authored by Dr. Winfield Scott Hall, which aimed to instruct young men and women, ages ten through eighteen. These pamphlets, each of which was age- and gender-specific, described sexual anatomy, the changes of puberty, and the rules of white middle- and upper-class courtship of this period. Taken together, these four texts are representative of a new movement in social and sexual health that hoped to solve a variety of perceived issues in American society, from race suicide to venereal disease, and they reflect a belief that the education of children was vital to remedying these problems.