The Nuclear Family and Gender Roles in Oregon’s Venereal Disease Campaign: 1911-1918

Abstract

The Social Hygiene Society of Portland, Oregon (later renamed the Oregon Social Hygiene Society - or OSHS) was founded in 1911 in order to combat venereal disease in the city and eventually across the state. Oregon’s efforts were part of the broader social hygiene movement taking place across America during the second decade of the twentieth century, which most notably advocated for an equal standard of chastity for men and women. Despite this single standard, promiscuous women (women engaged in premarital sex or sexual relations with multiple sexual partners) were systematically persecuted and punished while men were not. While a large amount of existing scholarship focuses on how the social hygiene movement targeted prostitutes and not the men seeking their services, little work has been done to investigate how the movement viewed husbands and wives within the nuclear family and whether partnerships were equal when it came to combating venereal disease. This paper investigates how the social hygiene campaign in Oregon from 1911 to 1918 viewed the nuclear family and conceptualized parental duties in combating venereal disease. It also analyzes how those duties equalized husbands and wives while simultaneously reflecting social gender norms of the time that relegated women to the home