| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Purity and Hygiene: Women, Prostitution, and the "American Plan," 1900–1930. By David J. Pivar. (Westport: Greenwood, 2002. xxiv, 283 pp. $69.95, ISBN 0-313-32032-2.)

David J. Pivar's focus here, as in his 1973 book, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868–1900, is on the evolution of those late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reform movements united by "the master symbol of a purified society" (p. 139). His earlier volume described the combined efforts of "new abolitionists" and the emerging women's movement successfully to thwart state regulation of prostitution (which implied acceptance of a double standard) in favor of less successful efforts to encourage a single moral standard for men and women. Purity and Hygiene takes up the story in the twentieth century, tracing the transformation of social purity into social hygiene: the narrowing of the goal of achieving "an urban moral covenant," in which purified sexual behavior would result in justice for women, healthier childhoods for future generations, and a reconstituted community, to a goal of merely closing the brothel and containing the spread of venereal disease by prostitutes.

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