Imogene Rechtin was seized by disgust and terror. Standing in a reception line at a women’s society event in Cincinnati in 1910, she watched as the hostess approached, welcoming each of the “30 or 40 women” ahead of her with a kiss on either the cheek or the lips.
“If only I had something to show that would prevent my being kissed,” she thought to herself.
A middle-aged mother of two with a deep-seated fear of germs, Rechtin had long since convinced her husband of the pernicious health risks associated with “promiscuous kissing.” At the time, a woman of Rechtin’s class could hardly go a day without encountering a smattering of smooches. A peck on the mouth was the standard greeting between female friends, as common as a handshake today. This Cincinnati soirée, with its blatant swapping of bacteria, proved to be the final straw for Rechtin, who over the next year and a half spearheaded a short-lived, largely unsuccessful national movement to abandon the practice of kissing.
Naming her group the World’s Health Organization, Rechtin distributed circulars outlining the case against kissing and mailed out buttons labeled “Kiss Not” for a 5-cent contribution. She and her hundreds of acolytes—most of them women—campaigned against kissing in all contexts, from the privacy of the bedroom to casual gatherings with friends.
“It is only in unity that sufficient strength can be gained to convince the civilized world that kissing is pernicious and unhealthful,” Rechtin declared in a public appeal.
Enduring the ridicule of journalists and the scorn of the medical community, the push ultimately failed to sway public opinion at large. But Rechtin’s concerns weren’t entirely unfounded. At a time of widespread public health crises and evolving ideas about how illnesses spread, kissing was an easily avoidable vector of disease.
Until recently, Rechtin’s story was more or less lost to history. Now, however, a new article in the Journal of Social History recounts her ill-fated campaign.
“She was basically right,” says study author Peter C. Baldwin, a social historian at the University of Connecticut who stumbled across Rechtin’s story while trawling through newspaper archives. “She basically understood what medical science was teaching us at that time.”
Behind Rechtin’s revulsion was a shifting understanding of disease. In the decades following the Civil War, doctors and researchers built on a nascent understanding of germs to refute outdated ideas about the causes of infection, like miasma theory, which blamed the foul air of decay and refuse. The real culprits, experts were beginning to realize, were microscopic germs—bacteria and viruses that could be readily transferred from person to person.