In 1903, concerned newlyweds or curious adolescents may have found themselves furtively reading advice manuals on courtship, marriage, and sex. A proper young African American lady may have received Golden Thoughts on Chastity and Procreation, written by a married couple in conjunction with a medical doctor, to learn the most healthful and responsible way to live her life. The book aimed to teach Victorian, middle-class sexual respectability. It included paradoxical messages on sexuality and procreation: “Prudery says: Keep still; do not talk about our sexual natures. Duty says: Cry aloud; let the truth be known; publish it to the world; save the people from pollution and destruction; from death. God says: ‘My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.’—Hosea iv. 6.” The book provided explicit discussion of puberty, sexual intercourse, reproduction, and venereal diseases (VD). It combined the science of the time with a solid moral and Christian justification. Sexual knowledge, it argued, was a blessing to both good health and morality.

But the story of Golden Thoughts was more complicated. On the other side of town, outside of the Jim Crow neighborhoods, white audiences could furtively read the same book, this time entitled Social Purity, or, the Life of the Home and Nation. The publishers did not edit the content of the book, changing only the title, the introduction (Golden Thoughts opened with an introduction by a noted black physician, Henry Rutherford Butler), and the illustrations. Drawings of black families in one and white families in the other made clear who the intended audience was. It appeared that blacks and whites had much in common and faced many of the same difficulties, but book publishers and sex educators were determined to keep them separate. Why?

The titles themselves suggest racial assumptions. Golden Thoughts is far more euphemistic, stressing “chastity” and “procreation” as the main tenets of sexual education. The stress on chastity implies the politics of respectability, so crucial to black middle class status, and defines sexuality as procreative rather than pleasurable. Social Purity links this individual book to the emerging national “social purity” movement and indeed suggests the importance of the nation in its title. Readers of Social Purity could improve the life of the home and the nation, institutions to reproduce (white) American culture.