Chien-Ling Liu

The sexual revolution that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s is one of the most profound social changes during the second half of the twentieth century in America. Before the revolution, there existed a norm proscribing premarital sex (PS norm); premarital sex was not accepted. After the sexual revolution, the PS norm no longer existed; premarital sex became accepted. In the literature on how premarital sex became accepted, little attention is given to the institutional change that transpired—the collapse of a sexual norm. This study specifies one micro-mechanism of this social change. Specifically, adopting methodological individualism and the prisoner's dilemma game, I develop a theory that explains how a technological innovation for contraception triggered a change in individuals' perception of premarital sex, which led to their behavioral change. As a result, premarital sex became accepted, and the norm proscribing premarital sex collapsed. I use General Social Survey data to test the hypothesized micro-mechanism of the institutional change. The empirical analysis supports the hypothesis derived from the theory. Based on the above analyses, I discuss two alternative explanations and the issue of teenage pregnancy.

ArgumentRevising the diffusionist view of current scholarship on the Pasteur Institutes in China, this paper demonstrates the ways in which local networks and circumstances informed the circulation and construction of knowledge and practices relating to smallpox prophylaxis in the Southwest of China during the early twentieth century. I argue that the Pasteur Institute of Chengdu did not operate in a natural continuity with the preceding local French medical institutions, but rather presented an intentional break from them. This Institute, as the first established by the French in China, strove for political and administrative independence both from the Chinese authority and from the Catholic Church. Yet, its operation realized political independence only partially. The founding of this Institute was also an attempt to satisfy the medical demand for local vaccine production. However, even though the Institute succeeded at producing the Jennerian vaccine locally, its production needed to accommodate local conditions pertaining to the climate, vaccine strains, and animals. Furthermore, vaccination had to conform to Chinese variolation, including its social and medical practices, in order to achieve the collaboration of local Chinese traditional practitioners with French colonial physicians, who were Pastorian-trained and worked at the Pasteur Institute of Chengdu. Thus the nature of the Pastorian work in Chengdu was not an imposition of foreign standards and practices, but rather a mutual compromise and collaboration between the French and the Chinese.