What Young Readers Ought to Know: The Successful Selling of Sexual Health Texts in the Early Twentieth Century

The Progressive Era reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries spawned seemingly endless calls for purity. Corporate and political honesty, wholesome recreational activities and reading material, and untainted food and drugs were among the myriad concerns of this period. Self-improvement was a darling cause of the day, and the individual's sexual health and mores became the heart of many reformers' messages. A few dared to advocate free love, birth control, and unabashed sexuality, but conservative voices insisting on self-control, which reformers called personal purity, were stronger.¹ Beginning in the late nineteenth century, individuals in government, church, and topically oriented organizations encouraged sexual health, a condition they equated with restraint.² One account stated that this work started in December 1880, when a New England minister and a feminist physician met with New York schoolteachers "to consider the propriety and the feasibility of introducing into all schools (public as well as private, in due time) some knowledge of the perils which beset young girls, who in ignorance of the hygienic laws which should be observed by their sex, . . . thus induce invalidism or premature death."³ There are other stories of the beginnings of American interest in sex education as well.⁴ Countless books and pamphlets, provided through the mails, sold after public speeches, and distributed door-to-door, advised general readers on the newly sanctioned subject of sex.

Physician John Harvey Kellogg proffered Plain Facts for Old and Young, and a medical professor, Winfield Scott Hall, would turn from writing medical physiology texts to crafting several popular books and pamphlets on hygiene.⁵ Lee and Shepard, publishers of the popular Oliver Optic and Dotty Dimples series for children, also released Horatio Storer's Why Not? A Book for Every Woman; this 1865 anti-abortion tract promised domestic harmony and divine rewards to those who bore children and insisted men control themselves. Awarded a prize by the American Medical Association, subsequent advertisements for Why Not? relied on the slogan "A Delicate Subject Delicately Treated."⁶ A puzzle card game registered with the Library of Congress in 1882 simultaneously promoted its author's "moral book" on "The Sexual System and Its Derangements," which would be "sent secured, postage paid, for 10 cents."⁷ Taking a rather different tack from the majority of writers, in 1897 Havelock Ellis completed his first volume of Studies in the Psychology of Sex. These titles were among the many that sent another sort of message to would-be authors and publishers: there was a burgeoning market for texts about sex.

The Reverend Sylvanus Stall, who was ordained as a Lutheran minister in 1874 before devoting his life to publishing, recognized the opportunities of the times. Also an author of religious works, his best-known titles were a series of sexual hygiene texts sold door-to-door for years before they were stocked in stores.⁸ Eight books comprising the Self and Sex series were in print continuously from 1897 until 1936, making Stall and his Vir Publishing Company singularly successful. Stall claimed much for his books, not all of which can be verified, but some aspects of his dynamic marketing are evident. Millions of copies of his books were sold in the United States and abroad, and even after his death in 1915 his books remained, in many minds, the emblem of self-read sex education.

Ministerial rather than medical credentials factored into the appeal of the Self and Sex series. Stall regarded himself as a godly man who had answered "a divine call to the ministry" and habitually got down on his knees to pray before a meal, even if he were in a "rather cheap" restaurant where the floor was covered in sawdust and debris carried in on workers' feet.⁹ Regardless of the seriousness of his faith, he was not at all hesitant to use either his background or his beliefs to market books. Religion and propriety formed text, subtext, and paratext of the Self and Sex series. Yet the books also reflected...