Overview

Social purity in the anti-slavery tradition, struggled to prevent State-regulated prostitution in the 19th century and neo-regulation in the twentieth. Joining with Mid-Western and Far Western purity reform associations and with the vigilance societies formed to end the traffic in white slaves, the American Purity Alliance left those organizations to join the Rockefeller and physician dominated American Social Hygiene Association. Seen as old lights by Rockefeller, purity reformers and their feminist allies were pushed to the periphery of power. They struggled to maintain the environmental implications of social hygiene, but lost to the eugenic/hereditarian thought that narrowed the movement's implications. This study raises new questions about American feminism, Progressive reforms, public health, and the significance of women's suffrage. Rather than rescuing prostitutes, the movement resulted in their further criminalization, deportation, and detainment. Venereal disease rates, rather than declining as they had in Europe, rose dramatically in the 1920s as a result of policies implemented between 1900 and 1920. Ultimately, the repression of white slave traffic and the closing of the red light districts rivaled or exceeded the scope of Prohibition upon the nation. Pivar provides a comparative perspective often missing in other studies of policy toward prostitution and venereal disease.

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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. -Morton Keller Spector Professor of History Brandeis University

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 [O]f considerable interest to those familiar with vice policy and the social history of the period. -The Historian For theorists investigating the history or sexuality in the United States, David Pivar's latest work is long overdue. -Traffic This book is a rich source for exploring the nuances of social change in a rarely explored aspect of American life. -AUFBAU Online ... 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 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 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 �O�f considerable interest to those familiar with vice policy and the social history of the period. -The Historian ?[O]f considerable interest to those familiar with vice policy and the social history of the period.?-The Historian ?For theorists investigating the history or sexuality in the United States, David Pivar's latest work is long overdue.?-Traffic ?This book is a rich source for exploring the nuances of social change in a rarely explored aspect of American life.?-AUFBAU Online ?...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 ?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 ?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 ?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 .,. 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 Pivar has conclusively changed the narrative of American social history. -John C. Burnha, Ohio State University author of Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History 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. -Morton Keller Spector Professor of History Brandeis University

Author Information

DAVID J. PIVAR is Professor Emeritus of History and American Studies at California State University at Fullerton. He is author of Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868-1900 (Greenwood, 1973).

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