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Updated: October 29, 2025
The continued use of the term "sex-hygiene," now that the scope of the desirable sex-instruction has been extended far beyond the accepted limits of the science of health, is tending to cause confusion.
I am especially anxious to avoid the narrow viewpoint of numerous writers on sex-hygiene who seem to overlook the fact that sexual functioning is only a prominent incident in the cycle of sexual influences in the lives of most people. Human life, and especially marriage, should no longer be regarded from the mere biological point of view as for the sole purpose of reproductive activity.
There is much in Miss Repplier's paragraphs which will win hearty approval from those who have come to believe, as advocated throughout this series of lectures, in conservative teaching of sex-hygiene and a larger outlook for sex-education.
The educational problems will be more definite and the support of the intelligent public more assured if we limit the use of "sex-hygiene" to the specific problems of health as affected by sexual processes and cease trying to make it include those phases of sex-instruction which have nothing directly to do with health.
Certain neurotic and hysterical men or women who lack thorough physiological training and whose own sexual disturbances have led them to devour omnivorously and unscientifically the psychopathological literature of sex by such authors as Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, and Freud, are probably unsafe teachers of sex-hygiene.
Likewise, most of the local American societies for sex-hygiene have names including such phrases as "social hygiene," "prevention of social diseases," "sanitary prophylaxis"; and only one, the Massachusetts Society for Sex Education, has a name which does not directly suggest the medical problems of sex.
The Association, therefore, recommends that institutions preparing teachers give attention to such subjects as would qualify for instruction in the general field of morals as well as in the particular field of sex-hygiene." The Future of the Larger Sex-education I hear many questions as to the probable future of sex-education. I am asked: "Is it moribund?" "Is it a disappearing fad?"
As to the relation between sex-hygiene and sex-ethics as phases of the larger sex-education, there has been much discussion. Several writers have contended that there is some conflict between sanitary and moral ends, but have failed to convince most readers that hygiene and ethics should not be associated in teaching.
September 23-28, 1912. Meeting of subsection on sex-hygiene, Fifteenth International Congress on Hygiene and Demography. Washington, D.C. February, 1912. Organization of American Vigilance Association. October, 1913. Merging of the American Federation for Sex-Hygiene and the American Vigilance Association into the new American Social Hygiene Association.
Such a woman is a very dangerous teacher of sex-hygiene for adolescent girls; and a positive menace to older unmarried women who, if free from absorbing work, may spend their leisure in becoming more or less restless under the unsocial, if not unphysiologic, conditions of unwelcome celibacy. This is no imaginary danger.
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