Young people are “seething with misinformation and distorted facts, and they want to know, not about plants and animals, but about themselves. Just teaching science, as such [in schools], might merely confirm them in their idea that adults are trying to avoid telling them things they really want to know,” explained Cecile Pilpel, director of the Child Study Association of America’s (CSA) study groups.Footnote 1 At a national conference on parent education in October 1925, Pilpel recounted her experience with sex education in New York City (NYC) to a predominately white, middle-class, and female audience. Pilpel advocated for sex education in the modern city on three fronts—the “physical side,” which included teaching eugenics in public-school biology classrooms; the “mental,” “moral,” or “spiritual side,” which involved instruction in ethical reasoning and character training in the privacy of the home; and the “social side,” which encompassed reformers’ work helping people understand the social problems that sex education could ameliorate. Schools, operating in ideological tandem, left topics like puberty, marriage, and moral development to parents and reformers, focusing instead on eugenics and reproduction in biology classrooms. Meanwhile reformers based in NYC advocated for sex education with the three-sided division that Pilpel outlined. Together, school and community programs approached sex education from these three sides—the “physical,” “moral,” and “social”—leading to an ideological linkage between sex education and social improvement that placed women’s reproduction and eugenics at the forefront.
Sex education’s entry into public schools in the United States was one of many Progressive Era reforms designed to mitigate the effects of modernity on urban cities.Footnote 2 As historians have shown, sex education reforms occurred alongside other progressive reforms, such as new developments in educational psychology and schooling; censorship and women’s moral reform organizations; and government-sponsored public health campaigns.Footnote 3 In the early twentieth century, progressive reformers advocated for public-school sex education curricula as a response to Victorian sexual ideology of the nineteenth century and to G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence (1904), which categorized puberty as a crucial period of psychological development.Footnote 4 Women’s moral reform organizations designed sex education programs as an anti-obscenity measure to protect adolescents from salacious commercial depictions of sex that they feared would corrupt adolescents’ development.Footnote 5 And, government- and community-sponsored sex education programs during the Progressive Era differed based on the raced and classed composition of their audiences.Footnote 6 Popular understandings of sexuality—whether embedded in psychology, moral reform, or racial stereotypes—resulted in programs that reinforced white, middle-class conceptions of reproduction and society.
Increases in immigration and the popularization of eugenic theories combined with reformers’ concerns about modern city life. Together these developments appeared to pose a substantial threat to society and the genetic stock of native-born citizens.Footnote 7 Historians like Jeffrey P. Moran have argued that early sex education coursework emerged in public schools because reformers perceived urban decay found in the modern city as detrimental to the moral authority of churches, communities, and parents. The reproductive and eugenic focus of early public-school sex education simultaneously sidestepped educational psychologists’ fears that salacious sexual imagery led to sexual deviancy, addressed reformers’ concern that urban city life had diminished the moral authority of parents and churches, and embraced Progressive Era science and bureaucratic rationality as a means of solving problems.Footnote 8 This explanation for why early public-school sex education assumed a reproductive and eugenic focus fits with some interpretations of Progressive Era reform: the increased reliance on science, modern child-rearing practices, and child psychology as well as urban reformers’ concerns about the deleterious effects of prostitution, obscenity, and commercialized sex in modern cities. Yet it overlooks an important underlying rationale for this iteration of sex education in US public schools—eugenicists’ response to increased immigration and their perception that modern city life threatened the genetic stock of native-born citizens. Sex education, rather than being a benign exemplar of progressivism, actually reflected some harsher aspects of progressive reform, such as racial nativism, Social Darwinism, and eugenics.
At the same time that advocates of sex education proclaimed the sweeping effects of racial improvement or degeneration on society, US public schools experienced major changes in their administrative structure and purpose. Progressive Era city officials consolidated administrative and economic power in public schools, which resulted in the loss of parental and community control over the formal processes that shaped public education.Footnote 9 In response, reform organizations led by parents and local community members emerged in what William Reese calls a “dialectical fashion” to oppose “the centralizing bureaucratic reforms embraced by business and professional elites” and to influence public schooling.Footnote 10 Sex education programs were just one part of a larger concern for societal improvement that drove parents and reformers to challenge the increased power of school administrators and advocate for curricular reforms. As historians have noted, a wide variety of social welfare programs like public health, nutrition, sanitation, and hygiene emerged because those outside of the existing school bureaucracy—like eugenicists, racial nativists, academics, and parents—wanted to democratize education, integrate the schools more fully into peoples’ lives, and address social problems associated with urbanization and industrialization.Footnote 11
This article builds on previous scholars’ examination of the relationship between the modern city and sex education by looking at four organizations based in NYC that led public schools to focus on what Pilpel termed the “physical side” of sex education: the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA), Committee of Fourteen on Vice Reform, United Neighborhood Houses (UNH), and Child Study Association (CSA). Each reform organization had a different target audience—the ASHA, UNH, and CSA, for instance, were national organizations headquartered in NYC—and each envisioned their contribution to sex education differently. Yet all agreed that schools were best suited to adopt sex education curricula focused solely on reproduction and eugenics because they reached a wider, more malleable audience. And all emphasized a shared understanding that the purpose of sex education was to improve the ills of the modern city by targeting the people whom eugenicists had deemed racially unfit for civilized society.
The ASHA, Committee of Fourteen, UNH, and CSA drew on different—and at times contradictory—facets of eugenic theories when they argued that sex education would improve society. At the time, universities considered eugenics a legitimate discipline and academics debated different ways that eugenic theories should come into practice. Leaders of these four reform organizations, however, did not contribute to eugenicists’ debates in academia or discuss the precise eugenic theories or practices that they though should be included in sex education coursework. Instead they molded their understandings of eugenics and Social Darwinism to fit their own racial and nativist agendas. The ASHA and Committee of Fourteen, for instance, discussed sex education in a loosely Lamarckian fashion that assumed certain character traits like criminality, juvenile delinquency, sexual deviance, and feeblemindedness were acquired from birth.Footnote 12 In addition, leaders from these two organizations, who were more concerned about policing criminality and promoting public health initiatives, articulated solutions that utilized theories of negative eugenics to reduce or eliminate reproduction among people they considered racially unfit. Leaders from the ASHA and Committee of Fourteen implied that if people with undesirable character traits did not or could not reproduce, then inherited social problems like hereditary disease and multigenerational poverty would die out. In contrast, leaders of the UNH and CSA relied on theories of positive eugenics and Social Darwinism to describe the need for sex education with a Galtonian and Social Darwinist bent. They explained that the positive approach of better breeding—or the increased breeding of people they considered fit—would improve the racial “stock” of the population, and thereby eliminate problems caused by people of inferior racial stock.Footnote 13 These differences aside, leaders from all four reform organizations advocated for sex education because they supported the eugenic assumption that individuals’ reproductive choices affected collective society.Footnote 14
Reformers’ racial nativism, their belief in the power of eugenics to improve society, and their desire to restrict US citizenship to certain racial groups contributed to adoption of reproductive and eugenic curricula in early public-school sex education coursework.Footnote 15 Newspaper accounts and archival records from the headquarters of the ASHA, Committee of Fourteen, UNH, and CSA in New York City provide answers to several crucial questions: What dangers did each organization attribute to adolescent sexuality and reproduction? How did each envision its role in societal improvement and in the nascent sex education movement? What did these reform organizations consider to be the ideal relationship between the home, school, and society?
Competing ideas about race, reproduction, immigration, and US citizenship circulated among reformers, especially as leaders of these groups and the ideas they espoused worked across organizational lines. Existing historical scholarship is hindered by examining these four reform organizations separately. Historians have discussed the UNH, for instance, mainly in the context of the larger settlement house movement, motherhood, and women’s moral reform whereas scholarship on the ASHA describes it as a logical outgrowth of the Social Purity Movement of the late nineteenth century.Footnote 16 This explains how each of these organizations fit into the larger historical context of progressive reform but overlooks the degree to which ideas about race, reproduction, immigration, and US citizenship helped reformers advocate for the introduction of sex education to the public schools.
Not all of these reform organizations shared the same concerns and goals, however. Each had different priorities that led leaders to debate, design, and implement the physical, moral, and social sides of sex education. Historians Jeffrey P. Moran and Courtney Shah, for example, have differentiated the ASHA’s interest in sex education from the late nineteenth-century Social Purity Movement, explaining that the ASHA, unlike the earlier Social Purity Movement, saw sex education as a public health imperative. Social hygienists, for example, believed that sexual immorality and disease stemmed from environmental causes, such as increased industrialization, urbanization, and immigration; therefore, sex education could no longer be treated as a matter of personal morality best handled by parents in the privacy of the home.Footnote 17 To social hygienists, schools were one of several logical venues for sex education because they already had a role in children’s “character development” and reached a wider audience.
They were not alone. Founded in 1905 by members of New York City’s Anti-Saloon League, the Committee of Fourteen proclaimed many of the same public health-oriented sex education goals as the ASHA, although its leaders sought to improve public health more by reforming police procedure and passing legislation related to vice, prostitution, and juvenile delinquency.Footnote 18 In contrast, the UNH and CSA included sex education and social hygiene as part of their larger efforts to improve urban housing, promote cultural assimilation through Americanization courses, and educate families in modern, scientific child-rearing techniques.Footnote 19 Despite their differences, all four reform organizations shared the assumption that the reproduction of racially unfit populations could be decreased and society improved if public schools in the United States adopted sex education curricula focused on eugenics and sound reproduction.
The American Social Hygiene Association and Committee of Fourteen on Vice Reform
Interactions between leaders of NYC’s Committee of Fourteen and ASHA demonstrated not only the interconnectedness of their campaigns for public health reform, but also how their concerns about reproduction, venereal disease, immigration, and US citizenship pressured public schools to focus on the physical side of sex education.Footnote 20 Historians focused on the ASHA have long argued that social hygiene reformers used fears about the spread of venereal disease, prostitution, and white slavery to recast sex education as an issue of public health and social welfare, rather than personal morality and virtuous living.Footnote 21 Others have shown that reformers and government officials in large cities during the 1910s and 1920s went to great lengths to criminalize prostitution and eliminate red-light districts out of a wider concern that the influx of immigrants led to the proliferation of disease, interracial sexual activity, illegitimate children, homosexuality, and juvenile delinquency.Footnote 22 In addition, the historical scholarship on Progressive Era education has shown that popularized concerns about immigration, urbanization, and public health culminated in the creation of a wide array of social welfare programs. Educational historian William Reese, for instance, explains that school health reformers, inspired by Theodore Roosevelt’s theory of “race suicide” and eugenics, and “armed with a set of questionable genetic theories and convinced of parental ignorance,” prevailed upon school administrators to institute medical inspections and hire school nurses.Footnote 23 Clearly, concerns about immigration, race, and citizenship shaped reformers interests in public health. Yet scholars have not thoroughly examined the degree to which these same concerns contributed to reformers’ understandings of race and reproduction as they tasked public schools with responsibility for the biological aspects of sex education.
Leaders of the ASHA and Committee of Fourteen discussed sex education and the public schools as part of a larger goal to improve public health and curb criminality in urban areas. Dr. William F. Snow, secretary of the ASHA; and Frederick H. Whitin, secretary of the Committee of Fourteen, corresponded regularly about their organizations’ goals.Footnote 24 Whitin wrote to Snow in 1916 about the importance of law enforcement and legislative action to treat and prevent the spread of venereal disease in NYC and used his experience working with juvenile delinquents at the New York State Reformatory for Women in Bedford Hills as a reference point for his recommendations on sex education.Footnote 25 Medical and educational experts considered some sexually promiscuous adolescents maladjusted or feebleminded, Whitin explained. And, reformers who worked with sexually promiscuous girls often fused gendered, classed, and raced assumptions about adolescent sexuality with popular theories of Lamarckian eugenics, Social Darwinism, and mental hygiene to justify their efforts to aggressively surveil, criminalize, and sterilize working-class and immigrant girls, instead of rehabilitating them in reformatories.Footnote 26 To reformers, the environment found in modern industrial cities was responsible for the spread of sexual promiscuity among white, middle-class girls. Environmental changes thus had the potential to distort or degrade the reproductive fitness of people whom eugenicists considered fit to reproduce. Courts and parents also used this rationale to send young girls to reformatories to be rehabilitated.
Like other reformers at the time, Whitin assumed this way of thinking about the dangers of the industrial environment and racial degeneration on reproductive fitness as he corresponded with Snow about the proliferation of venereal disease in NYC.Footnote 27 Snow sent Whitin a draft of his new ASHA pamphlet on sex education and asked for his feedback. Whitin responded, arguing that Snow’s pamphlet “assumes that the children know what my children [juvenile delinquents] do not know, and it is too educated for them” and promised to “write something about my experience and my ideas for sex training” at juvenile reformatories.Footnote 28 Schools, Whitin elaborated, needed to focus on including topics like reproduction and eugenics in sex education, in part because it would help prevent the spread of venereal disease among adolescents he considered racially fit to reproduce. In addition, focusing on eugenic topics would also help discourage the reproduction of unfit adolescents that Whitin assumed were incapable of rehabilitation.Footnote 29
Snow affirmed Whitin’s goals in his correspondence, although he noted that the two organizations they represented had different roles in sex education. He questioned how the social hygiene movement might “‘work for the education and safeguarding of immigrants on the one hand, and protecting our citizens from immigrants already infected on the other hand.’”Footnote 30 One solution, Snow proposed, was for public schools to help prevent the proliferation of social diseases by using sex education curricula on reproduction and eugenics to discourage racially unfit populations from growing. Like Whitin, Snow formed his argument out of larger debates about those considered racially fit when he addressed efforts to restrict immigration and US citizenship. He called for public health and education initiatives—such as ASHA-sponsored health exhibits, lectures, pamphlets, and clinics—to protect “our citizens.” And Snow described sex education programs as a way to discourage the reproduction of unfit racial groups and thereby improve society; he implied that the spread of venereal diseases and the reproduction of unfit racial groups were a foreign menace akin to unrestricted immigration because they threatened the nation as a whole.
Whitin specifically addressed immigrants and racial inferiority when he responded to Snow and pointed to law enforcement and sex education as a joint solution for public health concerns like venereal disease. He explained that sexual diseases among Afro-Caribbean people were a “veritable plague” and that his travels abroad had provided him with enough information to judge “the conditions there to be much worse” than in the United States. Whitin’s singling out of Caribbean immigrants in NYC was not a coincidence; he had recently traveled to Jamaica. In addition, by the time the restrictions included in the 1924 Immigration Act took effect, as historian Keisha Blain argues, approximately 20 percent of Blacks in Harlem—an area that the Committee of Fourteen targeted for anti-vice policing—were of Afro-Caribbean origin. Many from that population were active members of Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association to “end global white supremacy.”Footnote 31 Aware of this racial and political context, Whitin noted that “the whole colored population [in the Caribbean], speaking roughly, seemed to be infected” and expressed outrage that “immigration from these peculiarly infected regions … has been continually on the increase,” in part because of ineffective medical inspections at Ellis Island.Footnote 32 Whitin singled out the growing population of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in NYC as a likely source of venereal disease and condemned the inefficacy of US immigration procedures, subtly conveying to Snow that sexual diseases reflected not just a problem of personal morality but also of racial inferiority.Footnote 33
The public schools, Whitin maintained, had a role to play in combating this public health threat. He suggested that US public schools, and particularly those in NYC, should use ASHA-sponsored sex education publications like the pamphlet Snow had sent him because these materials focused on eugenics and informed immigrant and nonimmigrant adolescents of how their reproduction affected society. The Committee, in return, would do its part on the social side of sex education to reform related legislation on immigration restriction, juvenile delinquency, eugenic sterilization, and prostitution and to rehabilitate racially fit but morally wayward girls at juvenile reformatories like Bedford Hills. “Whatever is done here [in NYC] will best affect the country at large,” Whitin optimistically concluded, thus “no single thing could now do as much as [sex education]” to protect US citizens and improve society.Footnote 34
During this same period, the ASHA published and distributed its own magazine and pamphlets that emphasized the need for schools to teach the physical side of sex education. A 1916 volume of the AHSA’s magazine Social Hygiene, for instance, included a retrospective on the first fifteen years of the ASHA’s reform work written by Snow. Snow praised social hygiene reformers for collaborating with schools and parents to develop sex education programs. He explained that the ASHA’s initial and continued goal was not to take the place of parents or public schools but to “give direction for the movement of sex education” through its publications and community events.Footnote 35 Snow, much like Whitin and progressive school reformers, saw the ASHA’s sex education pamphlets, publications, lectures, and sex-segregated free health exhibits as taking responsibility for the social side of sex education because they helped the broader public understand that sex education could improve social problems like disease, health, and vice.Footnote 36 Snow further specified that the ASHA’s sex education work with schools and parents led to “building up better environmental conditions” and recognizing “the important bearing of such factors [heritable] as alcoholism, feeble-mindedness, lack of self-control, toleration of extra-marital alliance, illegitimacy, desertion, and divorce upon social hygiene problems.”Footnote 37 The factors Snow listed to justify sex education echoed the logic of Lamarckian eugenics popularized in Progressive Era debates about eugenic sterilization and immigration restriction at the time.Footnote 38 Reaffirming Whitin’s sentiment about the Committee of Fourteen’s contribution to the social side of sex education, Snow concluded with words of caution and some encouragement: “The old adage ‘Well begun is half done’ has often proved true. Whether it is given to this generation to accomplish so much for the social hygiene movement time will show. The future seems full of promise.”Footnote 39
The United Neighborhood Houses of New York and the Child Study Association of America
Unlike the Committee of Fourteen and ASHA, which had approached sex education through the lens of criminality and public health, leaders of the UNH and CSA described the need for sex education in psychological and familial terms that relied heavily on parents. The two organizations saw the social problems in industrial cities, such as disease, sexual promiscuity, and poverty, as the result of parents’ failure to shepherd their progeny’s psychological transition from childhood innocence to adulthood.Footnote 40 Historians have astutely pointed out that the decline of child labor, decreased mortality of children, and low birth rate at the turn of the twentieth century led many people to reimagine the role of children in society. In the nineteenth century, parenting manuals aimed at white, middle-class mothers assumed children would remain innocent until adulthood, but by the 1910s, according to historian Peter N. Sterns, manuals claimed that children’s “natures were no longer reliable” enough to avoid being corrupted by the modern environment.Footnote 41 The UNH and CSA’s assumption that parents needed additional instruction to improve what Pilpel had dubbed the “moral side” of sex education therefore grew out of this larger recasting of childhood psychology that linked poor parenting to social issues like sexual promiscuity, disease, immorality, and criminal activity. But the UNH and CSA’s focus on parents hinged on an implicit assumption that schools also had a particular role to play in sex education; schools would implement curriculum focused on eugenics and reproduction as part of the physical side of sex education because parents covered the moral side in the home.
Leaders of the UNH and CSA used arguments about children’s perceived psychological vulnerability to target certain groups of parents whom they saw as failing to teach the moral side of sex education. Since it was the modern environment that posed a threat to childhood innocence, they agreed that parents of children in immigrant and working-class neighborhoods—where disease, sexual promiscuity, juvenile delinquency, and poverty were most visible—had failed to supply instruction in character development and moral reasoning that children needed in order to avoid sexual temptations.Footnote 42 Leaders of the UNH and CSA viewed the role of public schools as offering instruction on the biological components of reproduction (such as plant and animal reproduction, genetics, heredity, and eugenics) while leaders of the UNH and CSA would focus on providing community outreach to assist parents in the moral side of sex education. The UNH offered lectures and conferences for settlement house workers on how to teach immigrant and working-class parents about the social issues related to sex education like venereal disease, health, and hygiene. By contrast, the CSA trained a coalition of white, middle-class women to organize and lead parent study groups in working-class and immigrant neighborhoods.
Settlement houses affiliated with the UNH encouraged parents to view sex education as a prerequisite for citizenship, as a civic duty. Settlement houses emerged out of civic-minded social scientists’ desire to construct more democratic communities and “change people.”Footnote 43 Yet settlement houses and the UNH were not just mere institutions of public charity when it came to sex education. For instance, some historians have portrayed the settlement house movement as only tangentially connected to sex education: as one part of a larger trend to bring issues from the “private sphere” into the public and as an exemplar of municipal housekeeping and public health that schools later emulated during the school health movement.Footnote 44 Nevertheless, reform organizations dedicated to “changing people” like the UNH were an important part of why sex education in public schools assumed a eugenic and reproductive focus. They not only encouraged parents to understand adolescents’ reproduction in relation to social issues and citizenship, but they also helped mothers to connect child-rearing and character development to sex education, leaving topics like heredity and reproduction to the schools.
Sex education fit into several different UNH offerings during the 1920s and 1930s, including programs to provide parenting courses and organize Mothers’ Clubs in immigrant and working-class neighborhoods. Monthly meeting minutes from the executive council of the UNH demonstrate settlement house leaders’ broader commitment to changing people and improving society. The UNH sought to establish sanitation and safety codes; assist public schools with problems like malnutrition, truancy, and compulsory education laws; promote public health by providing medical care and health lectures; encourage public morality by offering wholesome leisure activities and recreation centers for young people; and pass labor laws and deliver unemployment relief to families in need.Footnote 45 In addition, as historians of motherhood have recognized, settlement house programs promoted scientific motherhood and modern child-rearing as a way to speed up the assimilation process of immigrant families.Footnote 46 Announcements for UNH-sponsored lectures, for example, included titles like “the moral and habit formation in children,” “the role and attitude towards the negro in N.Y.,” and “the need to Americanize childrearing to prevent juvenile delinquency.”Footnote 47 A 1926 UNH conference program also included sex education as part of this larger effort to encourage immigrant and working-class mothers to rely on physicians, psychologists, and educators for child-rearing expertise. Aimed at social workers who led Mothers’ Club meetings and Americanization programs, the conference offered a lecture on “Working with the Southern Italian Family” followed by a talk given by Harry Overstreet of the City College of New York.Footnote 48 Overstreet was a renowned psychologist who frequently lectured for the ASHA’s sex education programs. He was also among the first to offer sex education and social hygiene coursework to public school teachers. Although a transcription of the UNH’s lectures on sex education has not been preserved, both Overstreet’s involvement in both the development of public-school sex education and his presence at this 1926 UNH conference is indicative of how leaders of the UNH saw their sex education efforts for parents as a supplement to public schools’ instruction on reproduction and eugenics in biology coursework.
One settlement house worker, who had attended an ASHA-sponsored sex education program at Teachers College of Columbia University, clearly delineated the moral and physiological sides of sex education. Miss de G. Trenholm, the headworker at the East Side Settlement House in NYC, noted this differentiation in her summer report, stating that during the summer months “all the Settlement Heads are supposed to do some work for the various schools of the city in their Physiological Departments.”Footnote 49 She described young girls’ sexual promiscuity as the key problem that necessitated sex education.Footnote 50 In a 1912 editorial, Trenholm boldly proclaimed, “New York’s biggest problem is not its police, its fires, or even sanitation; it’s its girls. We’ve got to save them, for they must be the mothers of the New York that is to be … [and] of a large part of the nation of the future.”Footnote 51 Trenholm vividly detailed the lives of “working girls” who filtered through the East Side Settlement House and indulged in immoral activities like dancing and immodest fashion. She argued that adolescent girls from working class and immigrant neighborhoods became racially unfit mothers because they were unprepared by their parents to understand how their reproduction affected society. “The school of mothercraft [sic],” Trenholm explained, is “a matter which practical eugenics must take up,” especially because girls need grounding in “the principles of womanhood, to impress upon them their relations to their homes and the Nation.”Footnote 52 Trenholm linked motherhood to citizenship and saw it as critical to her work with parents at the East Side settlement house.Footnote 53
Trenholm’s concern about the inadequacy of child-rearing in working-class and immigrant neighborhoods and her view that instruction in “practical eugenics” was the solution may have derived from Karl Pearson’s The Problem of Practical Eugenics (1909).Footnote 54 Pearson, a eugenicist who studied under the famed geneticist Francis Galton, promoted both Social Darwinism and positive eugenics as what he termed “practical eugenics.” He claimed that social welfare reforms that aimed to improve the degrading environment of “unfit” populations were too slow to prevent racial degeneration. Instead, better breeding—the practice of selecting a reproductive partner of superior racial sock—offered a long-term solution that would eventually improve the racial fitness of groups associated with social problems. Pearson’s racial improvement arguments stopped short of directly advocating for intermarriage to improve the racial fitness of unfit populations, although readers like Trenholm likely drew such a conclusion when thinking about how to apply practical eugenic theories to real-life scenarios. Unlike Whitin and Snow, who had ascribed to theories of negative eugenics and sought to prevent, discourage, or eliminate the reproduction of racially unfit populations, Trenholm applied practical eugenics inspired better-breeding logic as she mapped out a solution to the problem of sexual promiscuity in NYC’s working-class and immigrant neighborhoods.
Trenholm described how settlement houses could better prepare mothers to provide the moral side of sex education. Girls, she argued, needed to learn that they held an ethical and civic obligation to select racially superior partners if they wanted to break the cycle of unfit mothers reproducing unfit mothers and improve the city’s social problems. Young boys already practiced theories of better breeding because they naturally drew from better-breeding logic when they came “into contact with superiors of much higher grade” in schools and the workplace, Trenholm observed.Footnote 55 The solution Trenholm favored unconventionally and provocatively implied that girls should behave more like boys. She called on mothers and schools to provide sex education to girls because the combination would teach these girls that it was their moral obligation to practice better breeding for the sake of racial improvement and aspire to become “the mothers of the New York that is to be.”Footnote 56
Trenholm also maintained that settlement houses should promote practical eugenics by instructing mothers on how the moral side of sex education could supplement the physical side that schools only haphazardly offered at the time. Girls, according to Trenholm, “find in our schools ‘free education’ of a kind which does not educate, and other education, also free, outside schools, which educates too thoroughly in lose [sic] morals, vanity and selfishness.” Blaming unorganized cities, inconsistent schools, and uneducated parents for the spread of venereal disease, sexual immorality, and poverty, Trenholm specified that settlement house programs helped immigrant and working-class mothers connect reproduction to social issues and citizenship. Parenting courses would help mothers understand that instruction in moral reasoning improved girls’ morality and thereby society’s because girls would learn they needed to practice better breeding.
Parental education did not alone offer a lasting solution for the problem of unfit reproduction, however. Schools and the state, Trenholm maintained, could promote racially fit reproduction if they become more coordinated and consistent in their effort to implement sex education coursework focused on eugenics and reproduction. “Education is the basis of all progress,” she enthusiastically concluded, citing Germany as an example of how the public schools and the state (which became the co-guardian of children rendered fatherless) worked toward “an education which is really an education … in short, we must bend our energies and give our time and money to the conservation of that dearest of all our possessions—the future mother of our country.”Footnote 57 In the context of the UNH’s aim to promote modern, Americanized child-rearing practices and Trenholm’s commitment to practical eugenics and better-breeding logic, such as her example of “an education which is really an education,” subtly implied that lasting societal, civic, and racial improvement hinged as much on parents’ ability to teach girls that motherhood was a moral and civic imperative as on schools’ use of biology coursework on reproduction and eugenics to encourage better breeding.
The UNH programs that Trenholm identified as an immediate fix for the problem of unfit reproduction and poor parenting among working class and immigrant families were, at times, cosponsored by the Child Study Federation of America (later the Child Study Association of America or CSA).Footnote 58 The existing historical scholarship on the CSA explains its focus on parental education as an extension of clubwomen’s moral reform efforts, as a contribution to changing notions of motherhood in the 1920s and 1930s, and as part of a larger effort to curtail juvenile delinquency.Footnote 59 It also highlights the CSA’s collaboration with the settlement house movement’s Americanization programs as part of the coordinated effort to promote scientific motherhood that transcended race and class-based differences.Footnote 60 Historian Julia Grant, for instance, claims that parent educators from the CSA and settlement houses sought to ameliorate a perceived generational gap between immigrant parents and their children that stemmed from “the enhanced role of the school in everyday life.”Footnote 61 Grant explains that amid rising school enrollments, efforts to nationalize public schooling, and the popularized philosophy of progressive education that emphasized individuals’ role in social activism, the CSA’s fears about diminishing parental authority were overblown but not without grounding.Footnote 62 This explanation for the CSA’s involvement in the settlement house Mothers’ Clubs is also not without merit. Indeed, discussions of maternalism, scientific motherhood, and parental authority permeate the CSA and Mothers’ Club records. Yet historians’ focus on scientific motherhood and parenthood downplays the degree to which Progressive Era debates about eugenics, racial nativism, and immigration restriction also informed the CSA’s efforts to promote parent education and sex education.
Leaders of the UNH and CSA initially collaborated in the 1920s, ensuring that parental education programs featured many of the social issues that reformers used to explain the necessity of the physical side of sex education in schools. The historical scholarship on motherhood has rightly explained their collaboration in class- and race- based terms; as an effort by middle-class white women to impart their values on working-class, immigrant, and African American mothers.Footnote 63 But, the League of Mothers’ Clubs speakers series from 1928 to 1930, like settlement house workers’ discussions of practical eugenics and better breeding, underscored the importance of eugenics and reproduction as it connected topics like sex education to racial and social improvement.Footnote 64
The UNH grouped Mothers’ Club talks into the following categories: “Better Homes”; “Civics, Citizenship and Peace”; “Child Welfare”; and “Health” (which included a talk on birth control).Footnote 65 Historians have acutely pointed out that the “league mothers were unresponsive to the German Jewish women of the Child Study Association” who presented during the “Child Welfare” portion of this series.Footnote 66 Nevertheless it is important to note that the CSA’s collaboration on “Child Welfare” talks, which included lectures by Mrs. Feldman of the CSA and Miss McDowell of Teachers College, influenced the ideological goals of NYC’s sex education programs. Speakers talks framed topics like public health and sex education in terms of citizenship and racial improvement.Footnote 67 For instance, a course outline that the CSA provided the Mothers’ Clubs included a bibliography of popular child-rearing texts like G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence (1907) alongside the eugenicist Paul Popenoe’s Applied Eugenics (1918) and a plethora of pamphlets on eugenics and sex education from the ASHA.Footnote 68 Although transcriptions of the CSA’s “Child Welfare” lectures have not been preserved, a sponsorship brochure for this Mothers’ Club speakers series hints at how the CSA’s collaboration with settlement house Mothers’ Clubs borrowed language from larger debates about immigration restriction, citizenship, and racial improvement, which reformers had used to justify sex education at the time. Appealing to white, middle-class donors, the brochure explained:
The League of Mothers’ Clubs of the United Neighborhood Houses is one of the few organizations active in furthering the educational and cultural opportunities of the Mothers in our Tenement Districts, many of whom are foreign-born and illiterate, all of whom are hampered by economic instability. Our program of Health Education, Child Guidance, Homemaking Classes, Housing, Civic Interests, and Recreation is of inestimable help to the ninety-six clubs which comprise our membership. Nearly five thousand women, whose influence moulds [sic] the characters of future citizens are thus stimulated to a keen interest in our national life and a finer understanding of American ideals. … In these trying times we need your help more than ever.Footnote 69
Although immigrant and working-class parents involved in Mothers’ Clubs were not required to be Jewish, Jewish immigrants were among the largest population in the Tenement Districts that the UNH targeted.Footnote 70 This advertisement, which appealed to wealthy native-born donors, emphasized the “foreign-born” status of parents attending the UNH Mothers’ Clubs. The CSA’s phrasing about how a large population of working-class and foreign-born mothers “mould [sic] the characters of future citizens” underscored a broader assumption that UNH parents needed “inestimable help” because they were unprepared to provide their children, “the characters of future citizens,” with the moral side of sex education.
As the CSA grew and expanded in the 1920s and 1930s with the help of a grant from the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Foundation, it envisioned parental sex education in a more self-directed manner than the UNH and settlement house Mothers’ Clubs. The CSA offered white, middle-class women coursework to become child-rearing experts and study group leaders. CSA study groups, scholars have argued, aimed to educate immigrant and working-class parents because CSA leaders postulated that this population struggled with diminished parental authority and a higher rate of juvenile delinquency.Footnote 71 Yet the organization’s aspirational slogan, “to make our parenthood more intelligent and of the highest use for our children”— a phrase that utilized the future-oriented language used by supporters of racial improvement, Social Darwinism, and positive eugenics—and inclusion of sex education in the CSA’s study group curriculum also derived from reformers’ belief that immigrant and working-class families were responsible for social ills like disease, poverty, illicit sexual activity, and juvenile delinquency.Footnote 72
Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg, a self-educated Jewish immigrant-from-Austria-turned parenting-expert directed the CSA during the 1920s and 1930s. Gruenberg was a best-selling author, educator, lecturer, and savvy businesswoman with her own ambitions. But she also had an influential spouse. Her husband, Dr. Benjamin C. Gruenberg, was a public-school administrator, academic lecturer, and author of numerous textbooks and pamphlets on sex education published by the ASHA. Combined, their work helps illustrate the ways in which individuals and ideas cross-pollinated reform organizations and sex education efforts during this time period.Footnote 73 Under Sidonie Gruenberg’s leadership, the CSA not only partnered with the UNH to offer child welfare lectures, but also led study groups in immigrant and working-class neighborhoods and collaborated with universities to offer coursework on parent study and sex education. Gruenberg’s publications “translated the findings of child psychology for a popular audience,” bridging the gap between psychological and medical experts and lay parents.Footnote 74 As a wealthy, self-made, immigrant mother, Gruenberg’s prominent position as director of the CSA also aimed to make palatable their message that societal improvement required conscientious efforts to improve the racial fitness of working-class and immigrant families.
Sidonie Gruenberg agreed with the CSA’s study group director, Cecile Pilpel’s assessment that instruction on the moral, physical, and social sides of sex education had real, biological consequences for society. At the CSA’s 1929 conference for study group leaders, Gruenberg argued that changes in society—in demographics, economics, and politics—as well as in knowledge from new developments in adolescent psychology and eugenics had made parents’ role in sex education and character development an essential civic duty. In her keynote address, she described the urban environment where immigrant and working-class parents raised children.Footnote 75 She elaborated: “In a simpler civilization sex was accepted as a matter of course,” but “with the development of cities, and a more complex society, the young person is subjected to new conflict. While the environment still manifests the facts and implications of sex in a hundred ways, the home, the school and the church seem to have entered into a tacit conspiracy and comprehensive but very eloquent silence.”Footnote 76 Gruenberg, like leaders of the ASHA, Committee of Fourteen, and UNH, understood conditions in the city like increased immigration and poverty as a corrupting force for children’s psyches. Messages like this about the “eloquent silence” of community institutions implied that the corrupting influence of children’s environment led to racial degeneration and increased juvenile delinquency and sexual promiscuity among populations considered racially fit in a “simpler civilization.”Footnote 77
Like parenting advice manuals and psychologists at the time, Sidonie Gruenberg saw childhood as inherently vulnerable. In response, she prescribed parents a proactive, scientific course of action in the UNH’s immigrant and working-class neighborhoods. She called on parents to assert their “influence on the attitudes and practices of professional education” and warned them not to conflate “ignorance with innocence” and virtue.Footnote 78 Pushing for parents and schools to work together, Gruenberg subtly affirmed Pilpel’s argument that schools should provide the physical side of sex education to encourage societal improvement. She explained that schools had been inconsistent in their provision of scientific “information about the facts of sex and reproduction,” even though this information was necessary “as a basis for [children’s] later consideration” as adults.Footnote 79
Gruenberg’s message about what exactly children needed to learn in public school sex education programs was subtle. Yet she alluded imprecisely to broad concepts like better breeding and racial improvement when she referred to biological coursework as necessary for adolescents’ “later consideration,” assuming they would need it when determining with whom to marry and reproduce with. Sidonie Gruenberg was aware that many textbooks used in biology-based sex education programs used plant and animal biology to illustrate eugenic concepts like genetically acquired traits—her husband, Benjamin, had authored Elementary Biology: An Introduction to the Science of Life, which devoted the entire last section to “Heredity and Evolution.Footnote 80 Read in that context, Gruenberg’s overarching message that the CSA needed to help parents and schools to provide children with sex education indirectly (and imprecisely) argued that doing so had the potential to improve the racial stock of working-class and immigrant populations and thereby society as a whole.
Conclusion
When reformers like Sidonie Gruenberg couched arguments about sex education in terms of societal improvement and citizenship, they drew from loose—and often imprecise—understandings of eugenic fitness and Social Darwinism that were common in early twentieth-century debates about the modern city, such as immigration restriction, criminality, and public health. While historians have fittingly argued that public school sex education’s early eugenic incarnations stemmed from Victorian sexuality and psychological theories that considered children vulnerable, they also emerged because individual reformers like Gruenberg equated “the welfare of the children with the welfare of the community.”Footnote 81 Leaders of reform organizations like the ASHA, Committee of Fourteen, UNH, and CSA encouraged parents and educators to approach sex education from different angles because they believed it had a “social side” that connected reproduction to issues of racial and social welfare. Their use of eugenic better breeding and social Darwinist logic—even when reformers were imprecise in their application and use of it—places race and reproduction at the center of our understanding of progressive reform in the early twentieth century. Disparate reform organizations envisioned sex education could not only ameliorate the perils of the modern city but also alter the reproductive choices of certain racial groups deemed unfit for citizenship in a civilized society. And, starting with the First World War and continuing into 1930s, the CSA and teacher training intuitions like New York University, the NYC Normal College and City College of New York, and Teachers College of Columbia University began offering coursework for public school teachers in social hygiene and sex education.Footnote 82 Such offerings—amplified by the bureaucratic public school structure and reformers’ desire to make public-school sex education more consistent in scope and content—helped to conceive of women’s reproduction as the path to social improvement and citizenship, an ideological linkage reinforced by Progressive Era reform efforts that continues in debates about citizenship, immigration, and public school sex education today.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the SHGAPE Graduate Student Essay Award committee and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and support. This article would not have been possible without funding from Binghamton University and a dissertation fellowship from the American Association of University Women. Incisive questions from the late Jean Quataert on an early presentation of this work encouraged me to dig deeper into the eugenic threads of my research. I am indebted to Jean; my dissertation advisor Leigh Ann Wheeler; and an incredibly generous and kind group of mentors, scholars, and friends who helped me research, analyze, write, and edit this article, especially Wendy Wall, Adam Laats, Mario Rios Perez, Jessica Derleth, Tiffany Baugh-Helton, Sarah King, Katie Stankiewicz, and Chelsea Gibson. And, finally, a heartfelt thank you to my mother, Diane Haager, for not only reading every word I’ve ever written but, more importantly, for always believing my words matter.
