Imogene Rechtin’s ‘Kiss Not’ Campaign

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I
have not told you this, but I'm using the podcast
for personal therapy. Okay, here's the thing that I don't

(00:24):
know if I've ever told you were not. Do you
know how there are certain words you just don't like. Sure, Yeah.
One of those words for me, and all of its
variations is kissing. Really, it grosses me out so bad,
and I don't know why I've never known this about you.
I will use any other synonym I could possibly come

(00:48):
up with, however, silly. I don't know what it is.
It's like the French word that denotes someone is going
to marry you that starts with the NS. I also
don't like that word at all, and I don't know why.
It's very strange. I'm not anti romance at all, but
I know clearly some very specific areas where I don't

(01:08):
want to talk about it, and this is one. So
I'm like, that's not a way to move in the world.
So you have to break these issues. So we're going
to talk about kissing all day to day. Um, it's
very kissy kiss Kisserson. I read this thing in the
Smithsonian magazine in May and I have been thinking about
it ever since. And it was this article about a

(01:29):
woman who tried to get people to stop kissing, and
it's a great article, but I was like, there's more
to this, and I know it, and that article referenced
some of them more to this, but I just was like,
this is the weirdest thing. And it also, uh, there's
a lot of discussion of communicable diseases and people being
resistant and that seemed really really interesting to me in

(01:51):
our world we live in. Sure, but that is also
a difficult topic in the world we live in, and
this seemed like a nice way to kind of mirror
what we've all been living through for a while, right,
it's timely. We've been watching arguments about people taking steps
to ensure public health play out in terms of whether
or not they want to do that, if it infringes
on their desires, etcetera. Uh, here in the US and

(02:14):
in other parts of the world. That's been going on.
But this is an interesting way to kind of look
at a similar model that it had much less immediate
impact and it did not involve a pandemic. Yeah, so
today we're going to talk about a woman named Imagine
Reckton and her Kiss not campaign. So in nineteen ten,

(02:37):
Emagene Reckton was at a lady's function and she had
this moment of inspiration that was brought on by revulsion.
Imagine was a mother of two teenage sons. Her husband,
Lewis Reckton, was a successful businessman who ran a company
that made woodworking machines. She was actually born Sultana Imagene

(02:59):
Fraser in eighteen fifty six, and she and Lewis had
met when they were both working for the Cordsman Machine company.
She was a stenographer and he was a bookkeeper, and
they got married in eighteen ninety. Yeah. She was actually
ten years older than her husband, which for some reason
I love. She was in her mid fifties when she
was attending this lady's function in question. There were dozens

(03:21):
of women at the event. We don't have an exact number,
but she mentions at least thirty or forty that were
in front of her as they were in a receiving
line to be greeted by the hostess, who graced each
attendee with a kiss on the cheek or even on
the lips in some cases. Imaging is generally characterized in

(03:42):
accounts of her in general and this event as someone
who was a bit of a germophobe, and as having
social anxiety. I don't know how much either of those
is true, but I could see where people got there.
This whole scene, though, made her livid. She did not
want to be kissed, and she found herself wishing that
there were some way out of such greetings that would

(04:05):
avoid appearing rude. For wishing to sidestep a social custom
Imageane set herself in an interview later that year, quote,
I was taught by my mother that kissing breeds disease,
and I always disliked it. I gotta say, I would
not really want to be in a receiving line where
either I was kissing everyone or I was being kissed

(04:27):
after someone had kissed everyone. I would not be down
with that anyway. So the idea came to her was
that a button could be worn that simply read kiss
not I've had some similar buttons on my body in
the last few years. Even if such a button existed,
those shouldn't know if people would understand it. So there

(04:49):
needed to be a campaign that would educate the public
on what this button meant, so that people could wear
it and be understood as wishing to opt out of
being hissed. We would recognize us today is a pretty
normal process of bodily autonomy or consent. In the early though,
this concept was met with some resistance. Any of the

(05:13):
social stress of it. Aside, Wreckton's deepest motivations came, she
would say, many many times, from the kiss being a
disease vector, although she did not use those words. She
saw though, that direct physical contact like that could easily
spread germs, and she thought that continuing to do things
like kiss as a casual social greeting it was just

(05:33):
incredibly dangerous. She was not wrong. Keep in mind that
scientists like Louis Pastor and Robert Coke, who identified the
bacteria responsible for tuberculosis, had been working on the concept
of germ theory in the last part of the nineteenth
century and into the early twentieth century, So these matters
were known about, but they were still kind of in
the early years in terms of the public altering any

(05:55):
of their behaviors about it. Anti spitting campaigns had been
enacted in years before this, and there had been efforts
to educate people about the importance of personal hygiene, but
still in social gatherings, particularly in the middle and upper class,
it was really common for people to greet one another
with a kiss. Imagine Recton wanted to help spread the

(06:17):
word that it needed to stop if people really wanted
to stop the spread of disease. There is a whole
secondary element to this where racism and classism come into play,
where the priority to minimize physical contact was definitely a
way that people isolated themselves from other people that they
saw as other. A lot of the movement that already

(06:39):
existed regarding home and personal hygiene advice was kind of
aimed at keeping white, middle class and above households safe.
Those anti spitting campaigns that Tracy just mentioned, for example,
were intended to keep working classmen from spitting in public. Yes,
spitting in public is absolutely gross, but there was an

(07:00):
undercurrent of singling out poorer classes as being responsible for
dirt and disease and in separating themselves from minorities, immigrants,
and people of lower incomes. Middle and upper class social
circles kind of seemed to think they were not at
risk of disease transmission. Additionally, a lot of the advice

(07:20):
from health officials regarding what people needed to do to
be clean and to stop the spread of disease, these
are actions that were just not available to everyone's socioeconomically.
For example, isolating when sick is great advice and good practice,
but how was a person living in a tenement or
a multi family home supposed to do that? It just

(07:43):
wasn't possible. So the idea of lower classes being diseased
persistent because in some ways it was kind of a
self fulfilling prophecy. If you were living in really close quarters,
was really easy for diseases to spread. Yes, so it's
stead of saying, hey, we should figure out a way
to improve the quality of life of everyone, the idea was,

(08:05):
let's just not talk to those people are going near
them like uh. In night the Philadelphia Dispatch to the
New York Harold syndicated a column about doctors who advocated
against kissing titled declares kiss Must Go. That particular article
was inspired by another article that when in the monthly

(08:25):
Cyclopedia and Medical Bulletin, which was called Kissing Its Evils
and Benefits That was written by Dr John V. Shoemaker.
Dr Shoemaker had apparently stated in his work that because
kissing involves the mouth, that makes it an easy path
for germs to travel to the stomach and lungs. In
the article from the New York Harold, another doctor weighed

(08:46):
in this was Dr Clara Scott, who's described as a
homeopathic physician. She states, quote, the number of diseases which
kissing causes is unbelievable to one who has not studied
the question. I firmly believe the day will come within
a generation when a formidable anti kissing movement will be established,

(09:06):
and when kissing practically will be confined to the lower classes,
the educated people having been brought to see the evils
of the habit. Next to the evil of kissing babies
comes the sweethearts kiss. This is one of the most
dangerous of all. Husband's kiss soon loses its fervency, but
the kiss of two sweethearts is the paradise of the

(09:29):
tuberculosis germ and the diph theory of germ and other
germs too numerous to mention. During the long intervals, while
the sweethearts kiss continues, one may imagine the various germs
rushing backward and forward with unholy glee. This is the
longest way to go. Don't don't have long makeout sessions,

(09:50):
y'all um. The Washington Times ran a much longer version
of that article, which included a quote from another and physician,
this one Dr Rachel S. Skadilski, and she took a
more moderate approach to this whole issue, stating, quote Dr
Shoemaker is right, but let's be practical. It is my

(10:11):
opinion that all unnecessary kissing, the kissing without real affection,
should be abolished. This would reduce the germ evil to
a minimum. So we'll talk more about this tug of
war that played out in the press in November of
night as anti kissing advocates and their detractors fought it
out publicly. First, though, we will pause or a sponsor break.

(10:43):
In response to that Washington Times article we mentioned. Right
before the break, another brief article titled an assault on
Kissing appeared in the Washington Post. That article starts by
quoting Dr Clara Scott, almost in her entirety from the
previous one, but it does not mention her by name.
It just calls her a female position and because her

(11:03):
quote opens the article. It kind of seems initially like
the write up is going to be in favor of
the anti kissing cause, but the rest of it essentially
tears down Scott's statement and says that quote, these pestiferous
discoveries of modern scientists male and female become more and
more intolerable. It goes on with the rather cringe e

(11:24):
proclamation that quote kissing is all right in proper circumstances,
and enjoyable even if the circumstances aren't quite as they
might be. I don't know what the intention or meaning
of that is, but it just sounded real ikey to me. Um.
The article then includes quotations of poetry by Lord Byron
and Tennyson to show how very culturally important kissing is,

(11:47):
and then concludes by saying, quote, scientists real and spurious
have run the germ theory into the ground. They make
themselves preposterous and arouse just resentment in the breast of
every right minded man and sweet lipped woman. The holiest,
sweetest memories of mankind cluster about kisses. The abolition of

(12:08):
kissing would mean the blotting out of happiness, And for
what to avoid? The imaginary onslaught of a puny imaginary germ.
Bah let kissing, thrive and let the germs look out
for themselves. I like the implication here that everyone wants
to kiss people. Uh, there are clearly people who feel

(12:32):
very much that that is there entire reason for living.
So yet another take on this was written by Ethel
Lloyd Patterson, who was an opinion journalist from New York,
noting in her article Kisses under Ban of Brains and
Quaker City that Dr Clara Scott was from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

(12:54):
She claimed quote, so now we know what is the
matter with Philadelphia. For a long while, all of course,
we have all been aware that an indefinite gloom hung
over the Pennsylvania city, but we had scarcely attributed it
to a rush of brain to the head. But if
this is be true, and intelligence is really incompatible with osculation,

(13:16):
well then tis better to have lost your brains than
never to have kissed at all. Yet another physician, this one,
doctor Enrico Castelli, of New York City, was consulted for
his opinion on the matter for Patterson's article. His take
was quote, we physicians cannot expect to divert the course
of human nature. Our place is to fortify it as

(13:37):
far as we can against mishap. That is all we
can do. To say that we could, even if we wish,
to stop people who love each other from caressing one
another is utterly absurd. But from a purely scientific standpoint,
let me explain to you how little disease would actually
be prevented even if it were possible to place an
embargo upon osculation. I have made a special study of

(14:00):
acteria for over five years, and I have found that
practically every known germ is present in a dormant condition,
as one might say, in every human mouth. They are
taken into the lungs with every breath. Now, the reason
they do not develop is because the person is not
in the necessarily run down condition that affords them foothold.

(14:20):
I'm just gonna say Dr Castelli maybe needed some help
from a bacteriologist. That's just my personal opinion on that one. Um.
He basically summed up his stance in additional comments as
being the world is covered in germs and you're ingesting
them all the time, So go ahead and kiss because quote,
science will never advance, can never advance to the point
where contact with bacteria can be avoided. This is kind

(14:42):
of one of the phases of the germ theory of disease,
where there are people who are like, yes, germs exist,
but they only make you sick if with a lot
of spurious qualifiers. Well, it's also that thing where there's
not really a distinction between like bacteria and vir Yeah,
you carry all the stuff all the time, and I'm like,

(15:03):
my dude, no way, not exactly. So, Imaging Recton was
starting her social reform effort about kissing at a time
when there was already all this arguing about it. In
her living room in Cincinnati, Ohio. Mrs Recton launched an
umbrella organization for efforts, which was called the World's Health Organization.

(15:25):
This is not to be confused with the World Health Organization,
which was not founded until the World's Health Organization's pledge,
written by Imaging was quote. In order to encourage good
health and lessen the spread of consumption, I desire to
join the World's Health Organization, and hereby pledge myself to

(15:46):
discourage the custom of kissing on the lips whenever it
is in my power. It's interesting that this isn't a
pledge not to kiss. It was certainly implied, but this
pledge is a promise to discourage as from kissing. Once
the pledge was signed and sent back to Imagine's organization,
along with a nickel, person who sent it received their

(16:09):
kiss not button in return. So one of the things
that Imogene did to spread the word was to write
articles up and send them out to newspapers, and she
also gave interviews, and she got a lot of press.
Some of that press was fairly straightforward reporting on what
she was doing, but some of it definitely has a
mocking tone. But for a brief time, regardless of which

(16:32):
flavor you were getting, her message was being spread wide
and far. In June of nineteen ten, the San Francisco
Sunday Call covered the formation of the organization in a
picture heavy article titled to Kiss or Not to Kiss.
That article opens by saying, quote, after years of sporadic crusading,
a non kissing organization has been started in Cincinnati, Ohio

(16:55):
that is meeting with surprising success. This article states that,
acording to the society's president, there are more than a
thousand members and that the numbers are steadily growing, expecting
to have members in every US city within two years.
As an asside on that number, there were articles circulating
at the same time that said that there were five

(17:17):
thousand members already. Some of this might have been due
to papers picking up the story at different times, but
there were papers running in June and July of with
each of these numbers. That makes it all a little
bit confusing. The number is also just what imaging provided.
It does not seem like it was sourced from anything

(17:37):
other than what she said. We're going to run into
a lot of that as we go for it. Just
heads up this right up also described imagine stating quote.
Her name is Mrs John Recton. She is a rather
attractive looking, dark haired, brown eyed little woman of about
thirty five years who, long before marriage, was diametrically opposed
to promiscuous kissing. She began to preach her doctrine to

(18:01):
her husband, one him to her way of thinking, and
then started on her friends, with such success that the
World's Health Organization was founded and she was enthusiastically elected
its first president. As a note here, if you have
been listening and doing math, her husband's name does not
appeared to have been John at all. It was Lewis.
But she was also in her fifties, so uh not

(18:23):
thirty five. This article clearly pretty light on fact checking.
So now to address a question you may have. At
this point, it is not clear if Imagine and her
husband kissed. That may sounds unusual, probably because it's such
an intimate thing to ask a married couple. It seems

(18:43):
like a lot of reporters just came to their own
conclusions about this and then went to print with them.
Some rite ups during Imagine's relatively brief crusade state that
she did not kiss even her husband, and others like
the one we just read, are more careful to frame
her position as being against promiscuous kissing, which makes it
sound like she would not have been opposed to a

(19:05):
smooch with her husband, just not maybe a whole lot
of other people. Holly never came across a definitive statement
from Imaging wrecked in herself on this matter, so we
don't really know she did state that quote. It is
impossible to get lovers and sweethearts to realize that they
must not kiss each other on the lips. Kind of

(19:26):
makes it sound like she was against kissing on the
lips in all contexts, but I mean those romantic scenarios
she just described there that shouldn't list marriage as one
of them. Your guess is really as good as ours
on this. Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons that,
um her the story did get so much coverage, is

(19:47):
that people like to speculate on whether or not she
had like a marriage with no affection. Um it's sold
papers just the bottom line. On that same note, we
should point out not all of the will in the
anti kissing movement were against romantic kissing, even like by
couching it as saying listen, that's not gonna happen. Uh,

(20:07):
presumably they intended that to be with consenting parties involved.
Some of these people were exclusively focused on the kissing
of babies and children. Babies, of course, do not have
fully developed immune system, so there is legitimate danger in
having random people kissed them, particularly on the lips, which
was apparently pretty common practice in the early twentieth century.

(20:29):
This is gross to me for so many reasons, like
strangers would kiss babies yuck. No, but also babies are
druly messes and I wouldn't want to kiss them anyway,
No shade to your baby. They're all like that. I
was like, that as a baby, just the whole thing
seems very gross to me. Um kissing of young children,
of course, was also problematic, both because it's spread disease

(20:50):
and also because a child simply may not want it.
So there were people both within and without Imagings World's
Health Organization who really were only advocating for refraining from
kissing kids. Next up, we will discuss Emmagene Reckton's month
by month plan to eradicate kissing and thus she thought
disease first. That we will pause for another sponsor break

(21:23):
in that to Kiss or Not Kiss article that we
were talking about, Wreckton shared her month by month plan
for the organization to try to expand the group's numbers
and reduce the spread of germs through kissing. Because this
went to press in June, her first targeted group was
young brides who were having summer weddings. Reckton stated, quote,

(21:43):
the custom of kissing a bride on her wedding day
is a most dangerous one. To stamp out this evil
at once would be to accomplish the impossible. But we
have made the start and are much encouraged. She reported
that seventy five brides had joined her group and agreed
to wear their kiss buttons on their wedding days, and
when Imogene was pressed about whether she was suggesting that

(22:05):
the newly weds not kiss, she specified, quote, I mean
the relatives and wedding guests should not kiss the bride
and subject her to risk of getting consumption. Following the
summer brides, Redkins August goal was to get parents on board,
including not kissing their own babies. We're not parents. We

(22:26):
can imagine this would have been a hard sell for
a lot of people. I will say in more recent
eras there's like a whole conversation about like parents kissing
their babies being a part of their babies developing their
immune system, etcetera. Just as a note that September target shifted,
unsurprisingly to teachers, with the hope that they would not

(22:48):
only pledge not to kiss the children in their care,
but they would also explain the need to abstain for
i'm kissing in their classes as well. In October, the
organization planned to reach out to street cleaners and laundresses.
The logic there was that these were occupations that often
came in contact with a lot of people's potential germs,

(23:09):
so they would be inherently invested in spreading this anti
kissing message. November would be all about women's groups, including
church clubs, literary clubs, and game groups, and the hope
there was that they would all start to wear their
buttons to gatherings as a way to normalize social events
without kissing. Is a greeting for December. You might be

(23:30):
thinking that family gatherings might have been Imogen's game plan,
but nope, weddings again, since winter weddings meant big gatherings,
it was essentially a repeat of her July plan. Erect
and is also quoted in this article is saying quote,
my life for just one kiss sounds thrilling in romance
and poetry, but disillusion is found in the hospitals whence

(23:53):
lovers follow each other to the grave in a few
short months. There are quite some other women on the matter,
which so that most of them are really only concerned
about children and babies. Mrs Philip M. Walkenberg said that quote,
I don't think life would be worth living without kisses.
Of course, I don't believe in Promiskey was kissing, which

(24:13):
sheepens the value of the kiss. But it is silly
to talk about discouraging all kissing. Miss Albert Hill, quoted
in the article, made the case that telling people not
to do something just made it more alluring, but she
also mentions that she was raised in Japan, where people
simply quote don't do such things. Mrs bel de Rivera
of New York thought organizing anti kissing drives was simply silly.

(24:37):
Mrs William Cumming story admitted she hadn't really thought about
it much, and Mrs Harriet J. Wood thought, quote, the
practice of kissing is altogether too extensive. She qualified that
by adding that parents should absolutely be able to kiss
their children, and that young men and young women quote
are old enough to look after themselves. Although my favorite
response from this gathering of quotes from women was from

(25:00):
a Mrs Ida Husted Harper, who told the inquiring reporter quote,
if women could vote, they wouldn't be worrying their heads
about being kissed. This is like the get off the internet.
We have bigger fish to ryan. Get out of my face.
So this full page article also includes images of couples

(25:21):
kissing with captions that definitely seem intended to mock the
anti kissing cause. So things like this may mean tuberculosis,
and my, what a chance for those awful germs. These
are editorial choices that are worth examining, because though just
about all of these women that were quoted, we're not
really worried about romantic kissing, that was what the paper

(25:44):
chose to focus on. For all the visuals, there's just
not a single image of a baby or a child
other than kind of a menacing looking cupid. That cupid
scares me. It's not cute. Sorry to throw that illustrator
into the bus, but that cute it is frightening. Um.
The same month that that huge spread was published, the

(26:05):
Washington Post consulted a physician named Dr Harvey W. Wiley,
chief of the Bureau of Chemistry at the Department of Agriculture,
to get his thoughts on kissing and germ spread. His
answers are kind of salty, and they're dismissive of Recton's
group and its efforts. He told the Post that he
had never seen a single instance of kissing being the

(26:25):
cause of transmission of a deadly disease. He stated, quote,
a society for the prevention of kissing is nothing less
than a society for the prevention of pleasure. Just imagine
yourself in a kissless courtship. Can you contemplate a more
uninteresting predicament. I have feelings about Dr Wiley, and they're
not kind. Yeah, I want to introduce him to be

(26:47):
like the married a sexual people. I know I'm not
saying no a sexual people ever kiss, but you know,
not necessarily a prerequisite in every relationship. Well, he's also
if you read more of that, it sounds a most
a little predatory and yucky, of like men should just
be able to kiss women, and it's like, oh, Dr
whiley yuck. I don't. I don't stick to the Department

(27:11):
of Agriculture, please thank you. Yeah. Anyway, During the summer
of nineteen eleven, Immagene pushed hard for teachers to pledge
that they would not kiss their students when school returned
in the fall. This is not salacious. She was talking
specifically about teachers of really young children, like kindergarteners, and

(27:32):
when she spoke to the press on this matter, Mrs
Rerecton was quoted as saying, quote, teachers and pupils will
both benefit by it. A sweet faced kindergarten teacher kissed
her pupils goodbye, saying I'll take a good rest this summer.
In the fall, I'll give you more games. They tire
me now. She died of consumption in the middle of August.
Were the children exposed to consumption? Had the disease been

(27:54):
dip theory or smallpox, would they have been exposed to it.
Since you cannot quarantine a consumption or vaccinate against consumption,
how will we control it? It takes whole families to
the grave, teach the little ones to quarantine their mouths. Okay,
So imaging, as we've been saying, was not wrong that
a teacher kissing children could be a disease vector. But

(28:17):
she also seemed to really like to tell these stories
and no verifiable sources, which could not have helped her campaign.
In the case of that example of the teacher who
died of consumption, she doesn't even give a vague location,
and one would think if there were a known potential outbreak,
she might want to use her platform as an advocate
being interviewed by a newspaper to alert the community involved.

(28:38):
She also, in that same article quotes a prominent physician,
but she gives no name, and according to this anonymous
physician quote, if one of these buttons could be put
upon the bib of every newborn baby and worn till
the child is eighty years old. There would be more
old people than there are today. That particular right up
also includes a favorite quote of Emergy, who was quoting

(29:01):
someone else. She says that the group's health officers motto
is quote, kiss only your enemies. I want that on
a shirt, kiss over enemies. It sounds uh wonderfully evil. Uh.
Imaging always had this steady stream of information to share
that had legitimate scientific merit, But again she also always

(29:21):
went to extremes to make her point. Take this story
that she told in nineteen quote, I know of one
instance in a suburb of this city where a young
woman was a sufferer from tuberculosis. The young man who
called on her was well and strong. He became infected
during the courtship, and our investigation shows that the infection
was caused by kissing. They both died before the dates

(29:44):
set for the wedding. Again, no specifics, no other records
seems to appear of these people, and as a consequence,
the press really started to skewer Imaging with these outlandish
cartoons that sometimes went along with these stories that featured
things like all manner of contraptions to cover young women's
faces and make sure that they could not be kissed.

(30:05):
In nineteen eleven, she gave this statement quote in the
case of smallpox, the disease shows quickly after infection has
taken place, but in consumption it does not. Therefore, do
not kiss anyone. You are not sure by looking at
a person whether he has consumption or not. He may
not know it himself. Sometimes he is able to attend

(30:26):
to his regular duties till the last. If with the
expenditure of thirty million dollars as was spent last year
to conquer consumption, to say nothing of the heartaches for
the left ones gone forever, we could say we are
now rid of the disease, then the crusade against it
would die a natural death. But with all this expenditure,

(30:47):
we are still in the midst of it. Okay, that's
thirty million dollar number. I don't know where she got it.
I could not find a single source for it. One
outlet actually seemed to doubt her printed it as thirty
thousand dollars um. All of the others that I saw,
and there were quite a few, had the thirty million
dollar number but again I don't know where she pulled

(31:09):
that from. And if you look at national mortality statistics
for the US for the years from nineteen o six
to nineteen ten, yes, the number of tuberculosis deaths went
up from seventy five thousand, six hundred forty eight reported
in nineteen o six to eighty six thousand, three hundred
nine reported in nineteen ten, And numbers like that may
have certainly helped Recton's case, But that rise is actually

(31:33):
reflective of a much larger reporting pool rather than a
true rising cases. So if you look at the death
rates from tuberculosis per one hundred thousand people, there's actually
a pretty significant drop in that period. In nineteen o six,
one thousand, five hundred sixty seven point five people per
one hundred thousand died of tuberculosis, and in nineteen ten

(31:56):
that number had dropped to one thousand, four hundred ninety
five point eight. Obviously, they are not point five and
point eight of people, but it's the numbers game. So
that rate was actually dropping already, presumably from greater efforts
that had been made through public health initiatives. One thing
that merits considering is the ways in which Imogene Recton's

(32:16):
efforts were treated by the public and the press and
even medical professionals. She's kind of relegated to the role
of kind of a nervous kuk. Historian Peter C. Baldwin
wrote a paper that was published earlier this year in
the Journal of Social History, and he makes the case
that Reckton was also advocating for women to be able
to deny unwanted romantic attention from men by wearing the

(32:41):
kiss not button, So the served as kind of a safeguard.
Could it stop a man from overpowering a woman, of
course not, but it also sent a clear signal at
a time when women didn't really have a lot of
options to do so that we're socially acceptable. The other
thing about all of this is that least when it
came to romantic couples, uh imagine, was probably not really

(33:04):
just talking about kissing. This was a time when talking
openly about sexually transmitted infections was a not a thing.
So even in some of her writing, she seems like
she is actually talking around kind of a bigger issue,
but she will never actually reference like, Oh, I'm actually
writing an article that's about syphilis, but I'm talking only

(33:24):
about kissing, but that definitely does seem to be the case.
Bummer of Imagine's story is that it kind of sputters
out at this point without any resolution. After the autumn
of nineteen eleven, there were no more articles about her
anti kissing efforts. There were some people who carried on
the cause, but they weren't Mrs Recton. She worked with

(33:45):
her local suffrage groups and other women's groups in Cincinnati,
but nothing that ever gained her the kind of attention
or scorn that the kiss not message had. We don't
really know what she thought of the nineteen eighteen influenza pandemic,
although surely she had strong feelings on the matter when
she died in nine. Yeah, an interesting one. Um, I

(34:09):
have much more. Look, I got through that whole episode
and I didn't go back. Once I'm cured, I could
say kissing all I want now. Um Um, I have
uh listener mail. It does not involve smooching of any kind. Okay,
we got so many wonderful emails about our monarch episodes

(34:30):
that um, I actually have two to read. So the
first one is from our listener Alex, who writes, Holly
and Tracy, I love the Monarch episode. I love science history,
and your science history episodes are among my favorite, especially
since they shine light on people's overlooked contributions, especially Catalina's.
And thank you for mentioning that people should plant native
milkweed if they want to support monarch butterflies in North America,

(34:53):
since research does suggest that it is indeed better for them.
There are non migratory populations of monarchs in the US
that have been linked to the planting of tropical milkweeds
that grow year round compared to native milkweed species that
are seasonal or dormant in the winter. We mentioned this
briefly in our episode, but this is a kind of
a deeper explainer on it. The non migratory populations have
been associated with a deadly monarch parasite called O E.

(35:16):
This is ophree Cistus electro syra. I may have pronounced
that wrong, so planting tropical milkweeds may be facilitating the
spread of the parasite within the non migratory monarchs, which
can then spread to migratory ones. Well, I am not
a monarch expert. I ended up reading several monarch papers
when I was a grad student. Uh Alex went to
the University of Georgia because I knew the wonderful people

(35:38):
in Dr Sonja alt Dezer's lab who were studying this
very issue. Talk about milkweeds and monarch disease from the
alt Dezer lab can be found at the Monarch joint
Venture website that was mentioned on the podcast that was
again Monarch joint Venture dot org and this one. If
you probably do a search there for assessment of exotic milkweed,
you will come up with that. At that lecture, the

(35:58):
episode and behind the scenes disc Shion has reminded me
how I've wanted to plant milkweed for a long time,
and so I planned to get some native milkweed seeds
and have them planted by spring. Thank you, Thank you, Alex.
I hope other people maybe remember that they meant to
plant milkweed because it's good for the monarchs um and
and as we said, plant your local variety so that
you don't mess up with any any of their migratory instinks.

(36:22):
I saw a monarchy yesterday when I was on my walk.
I was two days ago when I was on my walk,
and I also walked past what a stand of what
I realized was milkweed because I had never seen it
like as a full grown plant before. I had just
seen kind of like illustrations of what the leaves look
like with a little caterpillar on there. I love it.

(36:45):
I love it. Um. My other listener mail that is
also about monarchs is from our listener Caitlin and I
wanted to include this. We did as I had put
out a call to ask people like our kids still
getting in person, is it's We got a lot of
people saying yes, absolutely, no. Um. This one is the

(37:05):
cutest of them all in my opinion, So Caitlin, thank
you up front, because I might start giggling while I
say this. Um. Hi, Holly and Tracy, I was already
planning to share a cute story about butterflies in the classroom,
and then you asked about it in the Friday Behind
the scenes. I teach preschool and I'm pleased to report
we are still raising butterflies in the classroom. Terrariums that
Tracy described, for reasons unknown to me, are caterpillars. This year,

(37:27):
we're painted ladies instead of monarchs. We prepped the kids
with lots of books and videos about the caterpillar to
butterfly process and when our caterpillars cocoon, we announced to
the kids will check every day to see if the
cocoons are hatching. One of my kiddos added check the
terrarium to his morning routine. After his belongings were stowed
in his cubby, he would march over and inspect the

(37:49):
terrarium from every angle. After a few days, I noticed
him getting more and more dejected when nothing had changed,
which led to this conversation me, Hey, buddy, you seem
sad waiting and be hard. Huh, kid, yeah, I want
to see them. Me. Well, the butterflies will hatch soon. Kid,
visibly distressed, But when will the raccoons come? The entire

(38:13):
two weeks that we had been discussing caterpillars, cocoons, and butterflies,
he had been hearing raccoons instead. I'm not sure exactly
how he expected them to fit into the process, but
boy was he disappointed to learn that raccoons are rarely
involved in butterfly transformations. As always, thank you so much
for all the work you put into the podcast. It's
one of my favorite parts of the week. Caitlin, that

(38:34):
is hilarious. Yeah, I read that, and I had a
good chuckle. When did the raccoons go? Listen? I understand
wanting to see raccoons. They're real cute. I also just
going to give thanks to Chad for sending us not
really an email of information, but just pictures of the
adorable Heidi and Max brother and sister kitties who looked

(38:55):
like trouble uh and apparently love attention, as well as
the kitty Syreen, who just is like, I don't know magic.
To me, Syreen looks like a dilute Tortych's mostly gray,
but I see some little pale buff color patches, which
means uh. And Chad mentions she has grown up to
be absolutely unstoppable. She goes where she wants when she wants.

(39:16):
She was a tiny kitten that they rescued, and that
sounds right for a dilute torty. So um. Thank you
for taking care of beautiful kitties and giving them attention
and rescuing them and for sharing them with us. Thank
you to our listeners that have written in about monarchs. Uh.
As I said during that that's a subject that is
near and dear to my heart. So it makes me
happy that one kids are still getting that education about them,

(39:38):
even if sometimes raccoons get involved accidentally. And too that
other people respond so much to that important cause. And
I hope everybody is investigating their local milk weed. Uh.
If you would like to write to us so, you
can do so at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as a
Missed in History and if you have yet to subscribe,
get on that easy peasy. It is super simple to

(40:00):
do on the I heart radio app or wherever you
listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Imogene Rechtin’s ‘Kiss Not’ Campaign