Controlling male sexuality: combating venereal disease in the New Zealand military during two World Wars

military during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians have written extensively on this subject, beginning with the Contagious Diseases Acts, which was intended to protect the fighting power of the British military forces during the late nineteenth century, and ending with what Lucy Bland has called the "militarization" of venereal disease in the mid-1980s.' Because the control of women, particularly prostitutes, was an obvious and visible part of gender bias in the military campaign, it has drawn attention from historians in New Zealand and other countries.2 We have learned a lot