In Sex Ed, Segregated, Courtney Shah examines the Progressive Era sex education movement, which presented the possibility of helping people understand their own health and sexuality, but which most often divided audiences along rigid lines of race, class, and gender. Reformers' assumptions about their audience's place in the political hierarchy played a crucial role in the development of a mainstream sex education movement by the 1920s. Reformers and instructors taught middle-class youth, African-Americans, and World War I soldiers different stories, for different reasons. Shah's examination of "character-building" organizations like the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) reveals how the white, middle-class ideal reflected cultural assumptions about sexuality and formed an aspirational model for upward mobility to those not in the privileged group, such as immigrant or working class youth. In addition, as Shah argues, the battle over policing young women's sexual behavior during World War I pitted middle-class women against their working-class counterparts. Sex Ed, Segregated demonstrates that the intersection between race, gender, and class formed the backbone of Progressive-Era debates over sex education, the policing of sexuality, and the prevention of venereal disease. Courtney Shah is an instructor at Lower Columbia College, Washington.
...MoreReview Alexandra Lord (2017) Review of "Sex Ed, Segregated: The Quest for Sexual Knowledge in Progressive-era America". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (pp. 372-374).
Review Lisa Andersen (2016) Review of "Sex Ed, Segregated: The Quest for Sexual Knowledge in Progressive-era America". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 561-563).
Similar Citations
Book
Khary Oronde Polk;
(2020)
Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948
(/isis/citation/CBB409809986/)
Thesis
David Alan Varel;
(2015)
Race, Class, and Socialization: Allison Davis and Twentieth-century American Social Thought
(/isis/citation/CBB664780930/)
Thesis
Leahy, Mark Henderson;
(2011)
The Mockery of Nature: Blackface Minstrel Humor and Race Science in Nineteenth-Century America
(/isis/citation/CBB001567327/)
Thesis
Alexandra Cornelius-Diallo;
(2006)
“More Approximate to the Animal”: Africana Resistance and the Scientific War Against Black Humanity in Mid-Nineteenth Century America
(/isis/citation/CBB864775877/)
Book
Smith, Kimberly K.;
(2007)
African American Environmental Thought: Foundations
(/isis/citation/CBB000930104/)
Book
Anthony Ryan Hatch;
(2016)
Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America
(/isis/citation/CBB245142743/)
Book
Farber, Paul Lawrence;
(2011)
Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas
(/isis/citation/CBB001033410/)
Book
Gabriel N. Mendes;
(2015)
Under the Strain of Color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry
(/isis/citation/CBB251110528/)
Article
Brian K. Williams;
(2014)
The African-American Personality: Early Conceptions
(/isis/citation/CBB920367459/)
Article
Patterson, Andrea;
(2012)
Black Nurses in the Great War: Fighting for and with the American Military in the Struggle for Civil Rights
(/isis/citation/CBB001212413/)
Book
Mary Kaplan;
(2016)
The Tuskegee Veterans Hospital and Its Black Physicians: The Early Years
(/isis/citation/CBB160176192/)
Article
Cheryl D. Fields;
(1998)
Black Scientists: A History of Exclusion
(/isis/citation/CBB299162098/)
Article
Patterson, Andrea;
(2009)
Germs and Jim Crow: The Impact of Microbiology on Public Health Policies in Progressive Era American South
(/isis/citation/CBB000932225/)
Book
Ruffin, Herbert G.;
(2014)
Uninvited Neighbors: African Americans in Silicon Valley, 1769--1990
(/isis/citation/CBB001552156/)
Book
Charlton D. McIlwain;
(2020)
Black Software: The internet and racial justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter
(/isis/citation/CBB252175354/)
Book
Jonathan M. Metzl;
(2020)
Étouffer la révolte: La psychiatrie contre les Civils Rights, une histoire du contrôle social
(/isis/citation/CBB840020850/)
Article
Phillips, Layli;
(2000)
Recontextualizing Kenneth B. Clark: An Afrocentric Perspective on the Paradoxical Legacy of a Model Psychologist-Activist
(/isis/citation/CBB000111951/)
Thesis
Jazmin Antwynette Evans;
(2019)
Scientific Racism's Role in the Social Thought of African Intellectual, Moral, and Physical Inferiority
(/isis/citation/CBB578195827/)
Book
Melissa N. Stein;
(2015)
Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934
(/isis/citation/CBB729336001/)
Book
Anne Pollock;
(2021)
Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB548925523/)
Be the first to comment!