Illustrations from an early twentieth century manual on “social hygiene.”
Questions provoked by these images:
1. What’s the “bad literature” the young girl is reading?
2. Can you imagine sixty being a “venerable old age”? (In 1900, the life expectancy of a white male like me was forty-seven(!)—I’d be in my dotage now at the age of forty.)
3. Why do men get an extra eight years before their life falls apart?
4. Am I the only one that would love to see the return of “social hygiene” manuals?
(Via: Sociological Images)
October 1st, 2009 | 8:37 pm
1. Gore Vidal’s “Messiah”
2. I can imagine 14 being a venerable old age. (You didn’t go to Lutheran parochial schools.)
3. The woman depicted is only an “outcast” — and that because she’s wearing a rooster on her head.
4. Yes.
October 1st, 2009 | 9:16 pm
Most important question at all: has the copyright run out / any chance some entrepreneur turns this into a poster I can plaster in my kids’ rooms?
The unapologetic use of words like “honorable” and “dissipation” is a much-needed cold shower, too. For me, at least.
October 1st, 2009 | 9:40 pm
Greg Most important question at all: has the copyright run out / any chance some entrepreneur turns this into a poster I can plaster in my kids’ rooms?
Yeah, they’re both in in the public domain. You can find the originals here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_two_paths_(f).png
I would love to have a poster of those.
October 2nd, 2009 | 1:35 am
Thoughts provoked by these images:
1) Bring back hats for both sexes!
2) The “outcast” 40-year-old woman looks just as dignified as her grandmotherly counterpart. Or am I missing visual cues e.g. rooster on head = ostracization?
3) The bad man rapidly degenerates into a hobo. The bad woman appears to have maintained her financial status. What’s going on here??
October 2nd, 2009 | 9:32 am
At 40 she looks 60. She’s alone. She’s dressed as if for traveling (fashionable rooster notwithstanding), indicating that she’s got no real home. Can’t really tell how shabby those widow-y clothes are, but I imagine that we’re supposed to infer that she is down-at-the-heels, shopworn, and unwanted.
October 2nd, 2009 | 9:46 am
Average life expectancies include infant mortality, child mortality, etc. An average life expectancy of forty doesn’t mean that most people died around forty. I think 60 was venerable because the culture of youth-idolization was not in effect, and it was okay to venerable instead of hip. Preferable, in fact.
October 2nd, 2009 | 11:09 am
There was a national social hygiene day in 1937. At that time social hygiene was a moral issue, not a medical one. The American Social Health Association is still active and can be reached at website http://www.ashastd.org/%20/about/about_mission.cfm
ASHA establishes the Nation’s first Social Hygiene Day
ASHA staged its first Social Hygiene Day in 1937, which also focused on campaigning against syphilis. The event included conferences, community meetings, radio talks, press releases and a message from President Roosevelt. In that same year, Walter Clarke as ASHA’s Executive Director succeeded Dr. Snow. To honor its first executive director, ASHA created the William Freeman Snow Award presented to individuals who had outstanding accomplishments in the field of social hygiene. The first award went to Edward L Keyes, Jr. in 1938 and Dr. Parran in 1939. In his acceptance speech, Dr. Parran acknowledged ASHA’s role in educating the public on the importance of venereal disease, without which the Venereal Disease Control Act of 1938 would not have been possible.
October 2nd, 2009 | 3:05 pm
“The appropriate age for marriage is around eighteen for girls and thirty-seven for men.”
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
October 2nd, 2009 | 6:20 pm
Why limit the effect of a Social Hygeine Poster to your kid’s room? I’d paste ‘em all over town.
October 2nd, 2009 | 8:21 pm
I think the secret is hats — except for the virtuous woman’s youthful fling with headwear at age 20, hats seem to be a sign of moral degeneracy.
October 3rd, 2009 | 11:40 am
The illustration is one I’ve seen years ago. It, unwittingly perhaps, underscores a weakness of confusing moralism for discipleship: it assumes a correlation between virtue and earthly happiness. This is the Edwardian precurser to the Prosperity Gospel.
Well, that may be nice for bourgeois civil moralism, but it won’t do for Christians. Christians are not taught discipleship in the hope of being good earthly bourgeois citizens. If anything, Christians are taught that the path of grace is a path towards and through the Cross, so it has no necessary correlation with earthly satisfaction. If you cultivate discipleship, not mere moralism, you may be rejected by family and society, suffer ill health and become a physical and mental wreck; worse still, you may even be persecuted by your own church in the name of Christ. As one notable disciple famously remarked during her travails of discipleship (I will leave it to Catholics to remember the identity of this famous saint): “If this is the way you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few!”
Unfortunately, this is a truth of the Gospel most American Christians try with their might to avoid. Reviving Edwardian moralism doesn’t help any.
October 3rd, 2009 | 11:01 pm
Liam, this poster certainly doesn’t represent the purity and fullness of Christian morality, but it does represent an important aspect of morality, which predates the Edwardians considerably: the idea that God forbids us to do certain things because they are _bad for us._ And commands other things because they are good for us. For instance, Exodus 20:12– “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thou mayest be longlived upon the land which the Lord thy God will give thee.” God is a good Father– he knows what we need to motivate us.
I want my children to follow the moral law, because breaking it offends God, yes, but also because breaking it will likely bring all kinds of misery into their lives.
This approach is also quite different from the prosperity gospel, which, as I understand it, doesn’t prescribe moral living as a way to get prosperity, but only belief and a check sent to the preacher.
October 4th, 2009 | 6:52 am
No, the prosperity gospel is about the idea that if you do right by God, he will do right by you in this world. If you bless God, he will bless you with prosperity.
I have no problem showing that sin has costs – though I think children eventually need to be validated in witnessing that sin often seems to result in what appear to be good things to sinners. But virtue will not necessarily result in good things in this life for you. It might, but the real path to discipleship may look more like what this chart depicts as happening only to the unvirtuous.
One of the longest standing temptations in Christian moral teaching is to confuse moralism for discipleship.
October 4th, 2009 | 6:58 pm
Yes, I guess you are right about discipleship– it’s about love and faithfulness, not just living a prudent and sensible life and following the rules. And Christ is our pattern, leading us to the cross, not a prosperous old age. But I think that is way beyond what the posters were trying to do. You have to start somewhere. When that rich young man asked the Lord what he had to do to gain eternal life, Jesus first told him to keep the commandments. We can’t skip straight to the depths of discipleship without first laying the foundation of morality.
I think what makes me and others really like those posters is that we look around and see the ruin that comes into people’s lives, everywhere we look, because they have not been taught morality, or “moralism,” if you prefer. Most of my children’s playmates at our apartment complex do not live with their fathers. Some of them have their mother’s boyfriends moving in and out of their homes. The children are expected to accept this as normal and not complain. This is so unfair to them. I wish their grandparents had pounded some of that “moralism” into their parents’ heads.
October 5th, 2009 | 5:24 am
My concern is that that American Christians have been very tempted to stay stuck in moralism – in no small part because bourgeois consumerism finds moralism of the prosperity Gospel type to be hospitable ground. For postwar Catholics moving into assimilation, that stage proved to be brittle and shallow.
October 5th, 2009 | 8:47 am
I agree with Liam. This is Prosperity Gospel. It is the embrace of a civic religion and comes with all the problems of such an embrace.
Odd that a journal lauding Rene Girard one month didn’t get it…
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