American Social Health Association

ASHA’s roots stretch back to the Progressive-era social purity movement. In 1911 two major purity organizations the American Purity Alliance and the American Vigilance Committee^[1] joined to form the American Vigilance Association. Groups that were more medically-oriented elected in 1910 Prince A. Morrow as president of the American Federation for Sex Hygiene. After Morrow’s death in 1913 both organizations^[2] (and tendencies) merged to form the American Social Hygiene Association, which was renamed in 1914 to the American Social Health Association.

Initial influential figures:

• John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (initial financial contributor)
• Charles William Eliot (president of Harvard University)
• Jane Addams (Chicago’s Hull House)
• William Snow (Stanford University professor and secretary of the California State Board of Health)
• Thomas Hepburn (leader of the Connecticut social hygiene movement)
• David Starr Jordan (chancellor of Stanford University)
• James Cardinal Gibbons (Baltimore, philanthropist)

• Social hygiene movement
• Maurice Bigelow

• ASHA Homepage
• Finding aid for the ASHA records at the University of Minnesota

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