Harvard President Charles Eliot Invents Sex Ed

Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard (1869-1909) and founding President of the American Social Hygiene Committee.

Along with holding the record for the longest-serving President of Harvard (40 years), Charles Eliot is also famous for modernizing Harvard’s curriculum by moving its focus away from a classical structure to one that reflected the Industrial era, offering sciences, modern languages, and history.  But did you know that Eliot was the founding president of the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA), an organization founded in 1913 to fight prostitution and venereal disease?  Eliot along with Jane Addams (of Hull House), Edward Keyes, Dr. Thomas Hepburn, Grace Dodge, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Dr. William Freeman Snow formed the ASHA to use education as a way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.  Soldiers during World War I were the first to benefit from ASHA’s sex education courses.  These classes were certainly very different from what we consider sex education today, but it is interesting to know that their precedent can be traced back to a social reformer and educator who believed strongly in the principles of the Progressive Movement.