Enrico Moretto teaches at York University, and he is currently the course director for History and Videogames. His research interests include moral panic, sexual education, healthcare and the Second World War. You can read his article in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada, vol. 34, no. 1 (2024) by clicking here.
The Second World War saw the Health League of Canada revive its campaign to combat syphilis and gonorrhea among Canadians. In his article, Enrico Moretto examines how the league extended to Canadians was intended to reassert the importance of morality to public health at a time when increasingly effective treatments for venereal disease lessened the impact of infection
Can you expand more about how gender norms and stereotypes influenced how the Health League of Canada promoted venereal disease films/education to the public?
Absolutely! Perceived gender norms and stereotypes had a marked influence on the Health League’s messaging, though it would be fair to say that the League was hardly unique in embracing a fairly rote approach to sexual education. The League maintained that men and women required different sexual health information, and it used this perspective when selecting materials for its campaigns and when deciding how said materials were to be deployed. For example, one can intuit that the League’s decision to embrace gender-segregated film showings/lectures was almost certainly tied to its belief that men and women required different information in order to remain morally and medically healthy.
Perhaps the most significant caveat to add, however, is that the League was (at times, at least) not entirely at the mercy of gender norms and stereotypes when it came to discussions of sexual desire and moral duty. The League generally maintained that both men and women were equally responsible for protecting their sexual purity (and that of the nation more broadly), eschewing the idea that temptation was gendered. Canadians of all stripes, it was believed, were wont to engage in sexual activity, and therefore education on matters of sex and sexual health should be widely available to the public. The shape of that education changed to accommodate gender norms and stereotypes, but the League quite vociferously insisted that everyone needed to be in the know.
Image 1. A pamphlet called Victory Over Disease, c. 1944. Source: LAC in RG 24, Box 12612, File 11/HYG VD/6.
It’s interesting that the League used two American films. Were there any discussions about using equivalent Canadian films? Were No Greater Sin and The End of the Road the only two films the League used?
Ah, this is a much more straightforward question to answer than the previous one! I do not get the impression that the League was troubled in the slightest by its use of American films (or, indeed, American supplementary pamphlets, etc.). Using The End of the Road seemed to be a stopgap measure anyway, and No Greater Sin was offered by Columbia Pictures with such accommodating terms that the League was more than happy to adopt it. After the October 1944 showings at Massey Hall, the League compiled a list of how the campaign was faring; everything from the title of the film to the decision to run gender segregated showings was reflected upon, but there is no mention of wanting to find a new film, Canadian or otherwise. While the League had access to other educational films (Damaged Lives had been used throughout the 30s, for example), I have found little evidence to suggest they relied on anything besides No Greater Sin and The End of the Road during their wartime anti-VD campaigns. Why might this be the case? Fiscal concerns, a desire to streamline operations, and a genuine belief that the films on offer were entertaining and useful (or some combination of all these factors) seem to be the most reasonable explanations.
You noted the messaging by the League had a conservative, ‘moral-medical’ slant. Was this perspective maintained beyond the war years and into the 1950s and 1960s?
This seems to be the case, yes. The League never really managed to completely doff the moralizing shroud it pulled around itself in its earliest days, especially when it came to sexual education. While I do not think the League was unique in advocating for a moral-medical model during the Second World War, it is fair to say that as the decades rolled on it was increasingly starting to show its age. By the time the 1970s came around Gordon Bates (who had been at the helm of the organization since 1919) was still doing his best to proclaim the importance of morality to public health. Of course, Bates was not the only member of the League, but his long and influential career as its leader meant that his views on the importance of morality in medicine steered the organization towards a moral-medical paradigm when it came to sexual education and venereal disease control. Bates, for all his dedication to the health of Canadians, was never really able to surmount the obstacle that was his own dislike of changing sexual mores. The League continued to shake its fist in outrage long after it was relevant to do so, losing ground with younger Canadians and (in time) just about everybody else.
Image 2. Poster from an Alberta Junior Chamber of Commerce anti-VD campaign, c. 1944. Source: LAC, RG 29, Volume 214, File 311-V3-17.
What tensions, if any, can be identified between the League’s emphasis on moral behavior and the evolving medical understanding of venereal diseases during World War II?
The League was not in conflict with most of the other voices in venereal disease control and education during the Second World War. In fact, with only a few possible exceptions (individuals like D.E.H. Cleveland, the acting director of venereal disease control in BC, may have been one), I have not found much in the way of evidence to suggest that physicians and educators in Second World War Canada favored abandoning morality-based messaging. On the contrary, many of the educational materials used in both civilian and military circles embraced fusions of moral and medical information. Everything from the educational lectures given by municipal health officials to the films shown at military training camps reflected an understanding that, while medicine was doing a better job than ever at curing venereal disease infection, morality ought not to be neglected. There was, of course, variation in terms of how prominent moral messaging featured, but it remains fair to conclude that the League did not stand out too much for favoring the moral-medical approach.
That said, the League’s emphasis on pro-morality preventative medicine did sometimes lead it to conclude that widely available, effective treatments for venereal disease could be a double-edged sword. Indeed, Gordon Bates worried that innovations like penicillin might lead Canadians to conclude that casual sex was essentially risk-free, leading to an overall decline in society’s moral standards.
Have you read anything good recently?
I sure have! As a caveat, I usually break my reading up into three categories: “things I ought to read for my own work,” “things I should revisit because it’s been a while,” and “things which are my ‘hobby history’ interests.”
From the first category, I recently finished Educating the Body: A History of Physical Education in Canada by Hall, Kidd and Vertinsky. Given that discussions of education and bodily health are right up my research alley, you can imagine this was a good read for me! I always find myself dwelling on the topic of how “health” and “character” have been historically intertwined after reading works like this, and it’s led me to consider revisiting what little I said about physical fitness and anti-VD campaigns in my dissertation.
From the second category, I recently picked up None is too Many again. I am curious if Abella and Troper imagined that their book would be worryingly relevant over 40 years after it came out. I do need to get my hands on a fresher edition of the work, though, since I would like to read Koffman’s afterword!
Finally, from the third category we have another classic: The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England by Barbara Hanawalt. What, it’s hobby history: your hobby history period can’t be the one that you already work on! I love brushing up on a bit of medieval history from time to time.