What Adolescents Ought to Know: Sexual Health Texts in Early Twentieth-Century America

Chapter 5: Battling Books: Censorship, Conservatism,and Market Competition

[ 152 ] Chapter 5 O Battling Books Censorship, Conservatism, and Market Competition Parents are beginning to realize the necessity of early instruction in matters of sex. The social diseases, a few years ago a forbidden discussion , are receiving the consideration of many thoughtful citizens. The public believes more than ever before that modern hygienic methods should be applied to all communicable diseases. —f. n. whittier Even as humanitarian and opportunistic impulses shaped the distinctive print culture of Progressive Era hygiene literature, equally forceful voices countered the aspirations of the genre’s progenitors. The bestknown hygiene titles for young readers realized significant circulation in the early twentieth century, and the realities of a growing market inspired imitators as well as opponents of sharing real knowledge about reproduction with adolescents. Challenges to hygiene titles emerged from outside the industry and within. Paul S. Boyer has aptly noted that when considered in its cultural context, “censorship history became considerably more complex and less black and white.”1 The related early twentieth-century phenomena of the success and the suppression of hygiene texts were also complicated, consequential developments. Although they never made best-seller lists, a number of titles nonetheless achieved significant circulations. Interest in sexual health texts was documented primarily by publishers themselves. Sylvanus Stall’s boasts that many thousands of readers owned What a Young Man Ought to Know or its companion volumes, along with equally self-conscious title-page counts of the imprints of not-for-profit texts, marked the demand for sexual and reproductive health materials informed, however speciously, by recent medical thinking. These self-generated reports testified that the re-invigorated genre was attracting readers, fostering competition, proprietary claims, and serious re-evaluations of what constituted propriety in print. An endeavor that had begun battling books [ 153 ] with declarations of the public interest, professional admiration, and good intentions was transformed as new figures joined the commercial fray and established writers reconsidered their roles and their responsibilities in assuring the common good. Initial, idealistic expectations about venereal disease prevention tracts shifted before seminal texts— works like Stall’s first titles and Alfred Fournier’s Pour nos fils—had been in print for even a decade. Where a treatise’s reach had once been all that mattered, the ownership of words and the presumed ability to profit from them or to protect them increasingly became an issue. Whether motivated by monetary or medical aims, writers did not assume that their initial popular works would tell adolescents all they ought to know. Instead, a succession of new books was designed to appeal to previous purchasers and new audiences alike. This authorial activity, sparked by the evolving scientific investigation of disease and the once little expected but continually more voluminous reading and redistribution practices, also reflected a largely unacknowledged competition. The demonstrable consumption of credible, current health information likewise reduced authors’ willingness to participate in the networks that Fournier had instigated to share free, uncopyrighted texts. Even physicians, whose professional ethics prohibited advertising cures for specific ailments and self-promotion, began to distinguish between the objects of these restrictions and their writerly endeavors.2 Three authors’ later texts called attention to these dynamics and their entailments. Fournier’s secondary, treatment-oriented writings were not affiliated with the French Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, which sponsored the printing of his first text for young men and supported its distribution abroad; conversely, Stall’s independent publication of The Social Peril revealed his connections to other prominent American figures invested in educating young people about sexual health. A third writer and physician, Winfield Scott Hall, indicated his understanding of these two men’s achievements in his efforts to emulate their success. Each writer’s work signaled different dimensions of the shifting profile of sexual health texts for young people. Shortly before the release of Fournier’s later guidance, Stall also shared more specific contemporary medical knowledge about venereal chapter five [ 154 ] disease in The Social Peril, a stand-alone, full-length work published by Vir in 1905. While the provocative title resonated with the concerns that characterized the Self and Sex Series, its reception diverged sharply from that of Stall’s previous titles. Instead, physician Prince A. Morrow questioned his right to share medical messages with a general readership. Stall was confronted not just by high-minded organizers like Morrow but also, less directly, by Winfield Scott Hall. A conservative reformer, Hall wrote and...