Easy to Get... Syphilis and Gonorrhea (1943), a venereal-disease warning in red

Easy to Get... Syphilis and Gonorrhea is a 1943 U.S. government venereal-disease poster with a Government Printing Office imprint and no named issuer. A woman in a feathered hat leans on a brick wall at night with a cigarette, in a street painted all in red (NAID 513617).

What the poster shows

Content note: the poster draws a woman as a stereotyped street prostitute and ties her to venereal disease. The page describes the picture as it was printed.

It is night. A woman in a feathered hat leans against a brick wall with a cigarette in her hand. The whole street is painted in shades of red. The text is three short lines.

EASY TO GET...

Syphilis

and Gonorrhea

[signature: illegible, lower right]

[imprint: U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1943-O-511293]

Who issued it

No agency is printed on the sheet. The Government Printing Office imprint dates it to 1943, and the archive describes it as part of a U.S. government venereal-disease prevention campaign. It is filed in Record Group 44 at the National Archives. Its NAID is one number away from that of She May Look Clean (NAID 513618), another 1943 venereal-disease poster. The archive lists the audience as the domestic public and the themes as health and war. The artist's signature cannot be read, and no print run is recorded.

What it gets wrong

The archive tags fear appeal and scapegoating, and both are earned. The poster gives no rates, no symptoms, no treatment and no place to go for help. It works by mood: night, a street in red, a woman alone. The ellipsis in the headline lets the picture finish the sentence.

Venereal disease is a fair subject for a public health warning. The trouble is where this sheet puts the danger. It locates infection in one kind of woman, drawn as a type, and leaves the reader to conclude that the risk lives on a certain street with a certain person. No man appears on the sheet. A warning built that way teaches suspicion of a class of women more than it teaches how disease spreads, and it falls on people who had no say in how they were drawn.

The 1946 Navy sheet Penicillin for Gonorrhea Works 95 Times Out of 100 takes a different approach: it addresses the sailor directly and tells him he may be one of the failures. Keep Out Malaria Mosquitoes shows a 1943 Public Health Service warning that gives the reader a task.