“Sex Education’s Many Sides”: Eugenics and Sex Education in New York City’s Progressive Reform Organizations

Abstract This article argues that reformers’ racial nativism, belief in the power of eugenics to improve society, and desire to restrict US citizenship to certain racial groups contributed to reproductive and eugenic curriculum used by early public-school sex education programs. It utilizes newspaper accounts and archival records from the headquarters of the American Social Hygiene Association, Committee of Fourteen, United Neighborhood Houses, and Child Study Association in New York City to answer several crucial questions: What dangers did each organization attribute to adolescent sexuality and reproduction? How did each envision its role in societal improvement and in the sex education movement? What did these reform organizations consider as the ideal relationship between the home, school, and society? While the existing scholarship explains how each of these organizations fit into the larger historical context of progressive reform, examining them separately downplays the degree to which ideas about race, reproduction, immigration, and US citizenship circulated among reformers, especially as leaders of these groups worked across organizational lines to promote sex education.