Physiological Identity of American Sex Researchers Between the Two World Wars

Abstract

Sexology as a field of medicine and social science was not named until after World War II, but an organized field of sex research was promoted by the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex (CRPS) in the 1920s and 1930s with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and support from the National Research Council (NRC). The field benefitted from the Rockefeller Foundation’s desire to reform both sex and medical education during this period. Originally funded by the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Bureau of Social Hygiene and a subunit of the Medical Sciences Division of the NRC, the committee became, after 1933, a joint subunit of the Medical and Natural Sciences divisions of the Rockefeller Foundation.1 The major achievement of this sex research project during the interwar period was a new understanding of sex function and its regulation in higher animals and humans. This new understanding was summarized for the first time in Sex and Internal Secretions, published by the CRPS in 1932 and in an enlarged edition in 1939.2