The image on page 401 of George W. Hunter’s 1907 Elements of Biology is strikingly out of place. It is a Greek bronze flattened to a black silhouette. A woodblock engraving in a textbook otherwise illustrated with halftone photographs. A relic of Renaissance anatomy covered by the soot of the Age of Steam. Yet there…
Continued from PART I. EUGENICS AS EROTICA In the first science-drunk decades of the twentieth century in the United States, when open discussion of sexuality was severely circumscribed by custom and law, efforts to understand and control sexuality – all the institution-funded studies of prostitution, journals on birth control, books on eugenics, lectures on proper…
Revised 30 May 2016 As far as the U.S. Post Office was concerned in 1930, birth control and pornography were one in the same thing. An 1873 federal anti-obscenity statue known as the Comstock Act prohibited the mailing of both dirty pictures and “rubber goods.” According to scholars, this act, along with associated state regulations…