The Progressive Youth: Sex Education as a Reform Movement in the American Progressive Era

The Progressive era in the United States was characterized by reform movements, as reformers pushed for improvements to American society, often through government regulation. Meanwhile, reformers spread middle-class ideals of family and morality to working-class and immigrant communities through the settlement house and Americanization movements, popular media, and public education. This paper argues that sex education was one means for Progressive era reformers to focus too on the individual. Beginning in the 1890s, a nascent sex education movement played a critical role in shoring up normative prescriptions of sexual behavior, family formation, and parenting. Through publications aimed at children, adolescents, and parents, authors offered guidance about puberty, reproduction, and courtship. I argue that these writers hoped to mold readers into what I term “Progressive youth” – a new generation of Americans who were expected to combine medical knowledge and a Protestant moral compass to create “wholesome and healthy” families for the new century. The sexual knowledge provided by these texts was expected to change the landscape of sexuality: preventing venereal disease, creating eugenically-minded families, and reinforcing white, native-born, Protestant heteronormativity. While scholars have previously viewed Progressives as reshaping society, we must consider the creation of “Progressive youth” as an attempt to reshape the self, focusing on the individual body and reproduction of the American “race.” “Difficult conversations” about the place of sex education in American society persist today, reflecting many of the same struggles between science and religion, and public and private, that were characteristic of the early twentieth century.