In 1901, ASHA's founding voice, Prince Morrow, lamented the unnecessary hostility between purity reformers and the medical community. In the twentyfirst century, that hostility still exists. A century after the founding of ASHA, the debate over sex education in the United States has not calmed. While in the 1920s, sex education found its way into many high schools and colleges, often in the form of preparing students for heterosexual marriage, resistance to it never disappeared. Sex education was domesticated throughout the mid-twentieth century, segregated by gender and often by race, stressing the value of heterosexual marriage. Then, once again, in the shadow of greater challenges to rigid social hierarchies, political forces pushed back against sex education.

Where Is the Revolution?

Many historians have pushed back the American sexual revolution from the 1920s or the 1960s to the 1910s.1 Restructuring the timeframe is crucial to understanding the early sex education movement. Prince Morrow and ASHA employed quintessentially Progressive strategies to manage sexual knowledge. He and his allies did not radically challenge existing standards of sexual morality but assumed that men were sexually aggressive, white women passive, and nonwhites problematic subjects for proper education. But Morrow and ASHA held fast to the Progressive optimism that most people could be taught to control their sexual impulses if only more information were available.

Efforts to introduce ASHA's message to the world, especially through the public schools, proved problematic. Progressives demanded that some institution fill the gap, because they doubted parents’ ability or willingness to teach the subject. A morality-based sex education curriculum, circulated by nondenominational Christian organizations such as the YMCA and the Boy Scouts, blended chivalry, sexual health, and manliness to form a white middle-class ideal. The character-building organizations that appropriated the social hygiene movement largely abandoned women, the poor, and racial minorities.

Outside of the white male ideal, the rhetoric surrounding sex education became far more cynical. The intense medical and social scrutiny of race at the turn of the century damaged social hygiene programs that crossed the color line. White southern physicians suggested that any educational efforts for African Americans would be hopeless, while African Americans dared to challenge stereotypes, creating their own programs to prevent disease and uplift the race.