Document 19.1 FRANCES WILLARD, On Behalf of Home Protection (1884)
Document 19.2 Abstinence Poster (1919)
Document 19.3 Indiana Sterilization Law (1907)
Document 19.4 The Immigration Act of 1917
Document 19.5 Sanitary Precaution (c. 1914)
INTERPRET THE EVIDENCE
What role does Frances Willard suggest women should play in controlling the behavior of men (Document 19.1)? What light does Willard’s memoir shed on the role of motherhood in shaping progressive values?
What connection does the abstinence poster make between disease and vice (Document 19.2)? What do you make of the absence of a direct moral argument against promiscuity in the poster?
Why was eugenics so attractive to many progressive reformers (see Document 19.3)?
Who benefited and who lost from immigration restriction laws (Document 19.4), temperance laws, and antiprostitution laws?
What racial assumptions lie behind the cartoon on health threats (Document 19.5)?
PUT IT IN CONTEXT
How did the progressives’ emphasis on disease reflect their larger vision of American society at the turn of the twentieth century?
How did progressives’ understanding of the sources of disease shape the kinds of “cures” they proposed for America’s ills?
Thinking through Sources forExploring American Histories, Volume 2Printed Page 152