Schools, libraries, club rooms, and special exhibit halls in areas frequented by teenagers during the 1920s often contained a set of posters extolling the virtues of fitness. The crusade, sponsored by the United States Public Health Service, the YMCA, and the American Social Hygiene Association warned against sexual promiscuity and, more specifically, venereal diseases, and in doing so stressed moral as well as physical fitness.
Had the exhibit been staged 75 or 80 years later, it would have worked perfectly as a PowerPoint presentation. In the 1920s it relied on poster exhibits, although lantern slides with the same content were also available as were pamphlets that elaborated the theme more fully. Far from dwelling on negative thou-shalt-nots, the posters offered a positive program. They emphasized accurate information -- sexual intercourse is not necessary to preserve manly health and vigor; seminal emissions and menstrual periods are natural occurrences -- and recommended the need for plenty of vigorous activity and proper diet -- get in the game; beauty comes from within, paint your cheeks from the inside out.
But all of this was inadequate unless accompanied by wholesome thoughts -- the man or boy absorbed in constructive and interesting work and thoughts had no time to bother with smutty stories; let your daydreams be fine and ennobling, not cheap and degrading. American youth was being offered the choice between the ruddy cheeks of wholesomeness and vigor or the wan or painted cheeks of depravity and social disease.
Two 48-poster series were created: "Keeping Fit" for boys, and "Youth and Life" for girls. “Keeping Fit” came first. In 1918 the U. S. Public Health Service and the YMCA created a sex education program aimed at adolescent boys. In 1922, the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) took the leadership in adapting the message with a similar series for girls.
While the two series shared many of the same individual posters as well as much of the overall message, they also displayed differences that typified attitudes toward male and female roles that were prevalent in the twenties.
Girls, according to one poster, are endowed with warmth of affection, intensity of purpose, and devotion to the welfare of humanity. Boys, on the other hand, are given initiative -- the desire to want to do, dare, possess, strive -- energy and manly vigor.
Girls were not discouraged from seeking a career if it did not interfere with family responsibility; they were encouraged to emulate a woman who "gives richly to the world through her work and her personality as well as through her children."
The emphasis on home and family was even stronger in another poster that identified women as "largely the makers of the home and the conservers of its spirit."
The posters, which evolved from a "Fit to Fight" campaign aimed at soldiers during World War I, received wide distribution. A report from the early 1920s indicated that 1,300 sets of the exhibit (either placards or lantern slides) had been displayed in 13,000 different settings, reaching more than 750,000 individuals.
The message reached a large, diverse audience. A special adaptation of the exhibit featured "pictures of colored men and boys." The YMCA of Harbin, Manchuria, held a father-son sex education dinner based on the "Keeping Fit" theme, but not until they had overcome substantial difficulty with the translation of some of the terms and concepts. The posters, their lantern slide counterpart, and the supplementary pamphlets were no longer actively distributed after 1930, but by then they had made a lasting impact. As late as 1947, the American Social Hygiene Association received a request from a woman in Brazil for a set of social hygiene posters like the ones she saw at the 1922 international exposition in Rio de Janeiro.
For further information:
Allan Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the Twentieth Century ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Alexandra Lord, “Models of Masculinity: Sex Education, the United States Public Health Service, and the YMCA, 1919-1924,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 58:2 (April 2003) 123-152.
Go back to the Main Page.