The United States Government sought to sexually stimulate then frustrate its soldiers to prepare them for an unpopular conflict in Europe, a Cambridge historian argues.
Recruiting attractive canteen staff; inviting female civilians to closely supervised dances; disseminating alluring propaganda; pressurizing troops to write to women back home; and detaining allegedly promiscuous women to prevent soldiers wasting energy.
These are just some of ways that America's War Department sought to harness pent-up sexual energy to motivate troops in 1918.
At the heart of this experiment was the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), a War Department-directed umbrella agency. Previous studies have demonstrated that the CTCA sought to control soldiers' and women's sex lives to prevent venereal infection and protect social morality in the US.
