World War I

“ . . . the debate on sexuality and sexual behavior during the war became increasingly part of a medical discourse. . . . Doctors were among the chief beneficiaries of this process. In Germany and the United States especially, they now came to be regarded and consulted as experts in the fields of sex education and sexuality more generally. In effect, then, the social upheavals of the wars, and especially the concerns it raised about the management of industrial production, human reproduction and military efficiency proved instrumental in hastening the medicalization of sexuality and, at least to an extent, in making possible new ways of rationalizing sexual activity” (Sauerteig, 181).