The Social Hygiene Movement and Family Stability

Abstract

THE complex which we Americans have named social hygiene is part of a much broader movement toward the attainment of what our forefathers stated specifically to be the unalienable of every man and woman in the Republic: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The struggle for these rights neither began with the firing of the shot heard round the world, nor ended with the surrender at Yorktown. It had its origin, rather, deep in the past, and, in spite of signal successes on many fronts, it is still being waged today. Action on the social hygiene front is part of the struggle; gains on this sector advance the whole line. The fruits of victory go to men and women and children and to the biologically determined group in which they live, the family. The fight for recognition of the dignity and worth of the individual is perhaps the oldest of our struggles for human rights. Out of it have sprung such diverse yet related gains as political liberty, the reformation of the penal code to wipe out extremes of punishment for crimes against property, and the great fight against slavery. From this same profound feeling for the rights of the individual there came into being toward the end of the last century a growing conviction that an end must be put to what was then called the white slave traffic: the sexual exploitation of women and girls for gain. The fight against commercialized prostitution, which grew out of this conviction, is and always has been one of the foundation stones of the social hygiene movement. Paralleling this development was a growing feeling for the worth and dignity of sexual love in marriage and a growing conviction that every child, eve y young person, should come to manhood or womanhood with understanding of his or her own sexual nature and a profound respect for both his or her own sex role in life and for that of the rest of the human race. We of the Western world have seesawed throughout our long history between a purely sensual appreciation of the pleasures of sex and a bluenosed denial of its beauty and wonder, both of which extremes left marks on children and, through them, the families that they founded. We are familiar with the extent of some of these swings: that from the license of the late Roman Empire, say, to the asceticism of the Middle Ages; and, again, from the libertinism of the late Renaissance to the austerities of the Reformation.