In the early years of the twentieth century, a young boy attending a YMCA summer camp at Camp Kiamesha, New Jersey, approached his counselor with a guilty secret. He had been masturbating and feared both for his health and his soul. His counselor confessed that he, too, was unable to overcome the sin of masturbation. He recommended that the two pray together, hoping that God would relieve them of their sin. The camp counselor, eighteen or nineteen years old at the time, would recall this incident as a formative memory of his youth, noting both the expected response from youth organizations such as the YMCA—prayer—and its failure to solve what he would later accept as natural sexual feelings. Finding his own early encounters with sex education inadequate and harmful, the counselor would later build a career and international reputation around sex education. He worked to create a broader scientific knowledge of sexuality, accept it as part of biological life, and break down the stigma surrounding it. His name was Alfred C. Kinsey.

Kinsey's adolescence suggests how white middle-class youths in Progressive America found themselves at the center of a maelstrom of social concern. How would the young men of his generation cope with this crisis of manhood? Industrialization and urbanization threatened traditional definitions of manhood, causing many Progressives to fear that the boys coming of age around the turn of the twentieth century would be soft, weak, or feminized. President Theodore Roosevelt exaggerated the perception of a crisis in masculinity in order to offer his own brand of militarized masculinity. Roosevelt advocated the strenuous life for American boys: a combination of vigorous outdoor activity, character training, and absolute sexual continence. Character building allowed American boys to strengthen their bodies and their morals. Through this regimen, Roosevelt believed boys would grow to be fine citizens and good soldiers, form strong families, and build an ascendant nation. As always, the ideal and the reality were worlds apart.

What part did sex education play in the creation of a strong, masculine citizenry? Unlike the medical advocates who dominated the American Social Hygiene Association, many youth organizations that undertook the topic before World War I de-emphasized disease prevention in favor of morality training in order to “build character” among those they wished to educate.