‘For Men Only:’ Sexual Health Education, Neurasthenia and the Modern YMCA in the Gilded Age

Abstract

In the late-nineteenth century, Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) presented medical lectures designated ‘For Men Only’. This article argues that YMCA lectures about sexual health relied on the discourse of neurasthenia to address sexual health and morality in medical terms. By demonstrating that sexual licentiousness could be both a cause and consequence of this common nervous disease, lecturers at the YMCA invited young men to understand themselves as victims of circumstance, corrupted by modern society. While this period in YMCA history is often considered part of the social hygiene movement of the early twentieth century, this article shows that the efforts of health reform in the 1880s and 1890s mobilised an approach unique to Gilded-Age America, one which served the to bolster the legitimacy of physicians and to attract men into YMCA Halls.