Men Faint in Fauver’s Sex Hygiene Lecture
Item
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Title
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Men Faint in Fauver’s Sex Hygiene Lecture
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Creator
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The Campus
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Description
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This article published in The University of Rochester’s weekly student publication, The Campus, details a fainting spell in a sex hygiene lecture. As the article chronicles, the lecture, administered by a professor from the physical education department, was interrupted when several men fainted. The professor, Dr. Fauver, attributes the fainting primarily to “nervousness caused by the vaso-motor system,” a diagnosis that can be read as a sarcastic, scientifically-veiled acknowledgment of the students’ squeamishness around the subject of sex. This source demonstrates how, despite a century of distance, students today are not dissimilar from students in the 1920s in terms of feeling nervous and uncomfortable when learning about sex in an academic setting. However, this source reveals some key differences from our contemporary sex education milieu: The Campus, according to its tagline, was published by the Men’s College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Rochester, indicative of the fact that the University was not coeducational at the time (its campuses were not fully coeducational in 1955). The article, then, is addressed to a male readership and concerns an all-male classroom. This single-gendered learning environment reflects the changing but still relatively firm separation of social spheres for men and women in the 1920s.
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Publisher
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Men's College of Arts and Sciences, University of Rochester
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Date
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May 28, 1926
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Source
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University of Rochester, River Campus Digital Collections
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Rights
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This item was published in the United States more than 95 years ago and is therefore in the public domain.
