Purity and Hygiene Women, Prostitution, and the "American Plan," 1900-1930

Subjects:

• History » American History -- 1900 to 1945
• Sociology » Sex & Gender Studies
• Sociology » Sociology (General)
• Women's Studies » Women's Studies (General)

Reviews:

• ...specialists may find the book useful for its reliance on archival sources and its reminders of how complicated a tale this is. Upper-division undergraduate and graduate students.
  —CHOICE 40-0618
• For theorists investigating the history or sexuality in the United States, David Pivar's latest work is long overdue.
  —Traffic 2004
• [O]f considerable interest to those familiar with vice policy and the social history of the period.
  —The Historian .
• An impressive amount of reading and archival research has gone into pivar's wprk, allowing him to trace, in both the social purity and the social hygiene movements, the internal divisions, attempted alliances, transatlantic influences, and misapprehensions by reformers and feminists of their influence on state and national policy.
  —The Journal of American history June 2003
• Recommended for specialists in U.S. social policy such as prostitution control and social movements, and recommended for all undergraduate and graduate research libraries.
  —Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 2002
• This book makes a distinctive contribution to the social and cultural histories and geographies that critically examine the regulation of sexuality in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries....Purity and Hygiene describes and explains the defeat of a feminist movement, and the elevation of a regulatory system that penalised and subordinated certain women, while it helped to shape the sexualised, gendered subjectivities of others....Pivar's impressive research makes this a valuable study and a rich resource.
  —Gender, Place, and Culture 2002
• This book is a rich source for exploring the nuances of social change in a rarely explored aspect of American life.
  —AUFBAU Online 2002

• Endorsement From Morton Keller
  Spector Professor of History
  Brandeis University: With total command of the sources, Pivar has portrayed in meticulous detail the evolution of the assault on prostitution and venereal disease from its intensely religious-moral nineteenth century basis, as exemplified in the American Purity Alliance, to the more scientific (and social-scientific) efforts of the American Social Hygiene Association. At the same time he has vividly portrayed the problems of conflicting purposes, analyses, and solutions that hobbled efforts to alleviate this wrenching, far-reaching social problem. Pivar has done a most impressive job of making the case that the assault on prostitution and venereal disease has a place next to the regulation of liquor, child labor, and other social abuses as a major theme in Americans' attempt to come to terms with a modern urban-industrial society.
• Endorsement From John C. Burnha,
  Ohio State University
  author of Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History: Pivar has conclusively changed the narrative of American social history.

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• Introduction
• The Apogee of Anglo-American Cooperation
• Changing Medical Policy Toward Prostitution
• A Movement in Transition
• A Revitalized Movement
• The Search for Policy
• Rockefeller Reshapes Social Hygiene
• Ideology, Economy and Social Policy
• Conserving the Nation's Health
• Social Hygiene Militant
• Epilogue: Planning for the 1920s and Beyond
• Selected Bibliography