Dissertation

The Sick and the Sinner: Sexual Health and Sexual Morals in the Progressive and Reagan Eras

Sander, Joshua D

2020

Overview

Sexual education and its relationship to issues of morality, religion, contraception, abortion, and eugenics have generated controversy in the United States for the last two centuries. During the Progressive Era (roughly late 1880s-early 1920s) and the Reagan Era (roughly late 1970s-early 1990s) this controversy garnered more national spotlight as the tone became more urgent for the same reason: epidemics of incurable sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Syphilis and gonorrhea forced Progressive-Era Americans—as AIDS, herpes, and teenage pregnancy forced Reagan-Era Americans—to fervently search for cures as the numbers of those dead, diseased, and disadvantaged grew rapidly. This thesis explores the common division of opinion that occurred in both eras between those who sought a moral solution to the epidemics (moralists) and those who promoted a medical solution (hygienists). Moralists desired a national revival of Christian sexual ethics and believed that to expect anything less constituted a tacit approval of immorality. Hygienists saw such revivalist visions as naïve and sought to develop medical treatments for STDs and to educate the public on the best ways of avoiding infection even if sexually active. This division only sharpened as both camps formed public activist groups, as more issues of sexuality inevitably became involved in the debates, and as the issue of educating the nation’s children became a point of extra contention. Throughout it all, religious rhetoric (and opposition to it) characterized much of the public debate, as religious and irreligious people stood on both sides of the conflict.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: American history / History / Religious history / Sexuality
• ISBN: 9798662480469