Sexual Hygiene and the Habituation of Childhood Sexuality

Abstract

In his role as the director of the Sex Education Program for the American Social Hygiene Association, Thomas Galloway illuminated the gravity of sex instruction for teachers and other professionals in his 1924 text Sex and Social Health. An education in hygiene, due to its ability to shape and train the sexual impulse, supplied a threefold promise: perfection in the individual, the family, and the race. Distancing himself from earlier sexual reform movements, Galloway argued that science would provide a rational prophylaxis against the “misuses” of sex that resulted in “bodily disease and death, personal unhappiness and torture of the mind” as well as “disintegration of individual character, and in social distrust and decay” (126).¹ For Galloway, the aspirations of sexual hygiene could be realized through the body of the child trained in a frank and scientific “sex-social education,” because such instruction would create an “understanding of society” in the child, “so that certain favored forms of conduct and qualities [would] be strengthened and made habitual” (127). More generally, social hygiene transformed the locus of concern surrounding the child and its sexuality from a predominately individualistic, moral, and familial endeavor (as was the case in the social purity movement) to a “progressive” and public normalizing project. The concept of “normal” being deployed by this discourse was a definitively narrow and constricted one, as the movement sought to create and reproduce acceptable gender characteristics and reproductive monogamy in the child. This transition in approach was fostered through the legitimacy of medical expertise, the advancement of childhood as a “community” problem in need of a scientific cure, and their reliance on and contribution to the scientific examination of sexuality that took place at the turn of the century.

They must have both their own natures and the conditions of the environment explained and interpreted to them in the light of all that we have discovered of successful sex life in order that they, in turn, may use their sexual and other qualities to advantage. This adequate sex-social education is our best chance to help children solve from the inside the problems of their own lives as they arise.

Thomas W. Galloway (1924)