Shaping Sexual Knowledge

A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe

Lutz Sauerteig, Roger Davidson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134220885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The history of sex education enables us to gain valuable insights into the cultural constructions of what different societies have defined as 'normal' sexuality and sexual health. Yet, the history of sex education has only recently attracted the full attention of historians of modern sexuality.

Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe makes a considerable contribution not only to the cultural history of sexual enlightenment and identity in modern Europe, but also to the history of childhood and adolescence. The essays collected in this volume treat sex education in the broadest sense, incorporating all aspects of the formal and informal shaping of sexual knowledge and awareness of the young. The volume, therefore, not only addresses officially-sanctioned and regulated sex education delivered within the school system and regulated by the State and in some cases the Church, but also the content, iconography and experience of sexual enlightenment within the private sphere of the family and as portrayed through the media.

1
Shaping the Sexual Knowledge of the Young

Introduction

Lutz D. H. Sauerteig and Roger Davidson

The mid-1970s marked a turning point in the historiography of sexuality. Michel Foucault both de-naturalised and historicised ‘sexuality’, and consequently sexuality was increasingly interpreted as a historically contingent practice closely connected to power relations and values.¹ Sexual identities were no longer perceived as biologically determined but as both shaped by and shaping sexual cultures.² Within this framework of analysis, researchers in a variety of disciplines subsequently explored the formation and experience of sexuality in relation to class, gender, and race as well as to medicine and science. As part of this process, issues such as homosexuality, prostitution, venereal diseases (VD), masturbation and sexual abuse have attracted increasing attention.³ As a result we have a great deal of information about the construction of what have been perceived as ‘deviant’ or ‘dangerous’ sexualities.

However, while the history of such sexualities reveals much about social assumptions, fears and norms, focusing on ‘aberrant’ and liminal sexual experiences and their associated discourses of exclusion arguably affords a rather limited historical perspective. As the American cultural historian, Paula Fass, rightly observed, ‘questions concerning the experience of most people have dropped from sight, replaced with issues about sexuality on the margin’.⁴ In contrast, the history of sex education enables us to gain valuable insights into the cultural construction of what society perceived and prescribed as ‘normal’ sexuality. More especially, by studying the enlightenment of the young (broadly for the purposes of this volume defined as covering the age range from one year to the early twenties), additional insights can be gained into the shaping of gender and sexual identities and the way it reflects societies’ legacy of moral and sexual fears and aspirations for the future. Moreover, the different forms of textual and illustrative material employed for sex education allows for a broad range of questions to be asked on the making of the sexed body and gender and on how ‘heterosexual’ activities have hitherto been constructed.⁵

Child Sexuality

Since the pioneering work of Philip Ariès in the early 1960s there has been increasing interest in the cultural and social history of childhood, and of the relationship of children to adults.⁶ From the historiography of childhood, it is evident that society’s perception of children’s sexuality and their sexual knowledge has shifted significantly over time and differed greatly between cultures.⁷ Prior to the eighteenth century and Rousseau’s pronouncement of their ‘innocence’, there was a widely-held notion that children were naturally wicked and corrupted and that they required strict education, including flogging, to form them into moral human beings. In particular, churches and physicians were acutely concerned at the dangers of children masturbating. Thereafter, during the Enlightenment, a belief grew in the sexual innocence of children and, during the nineteenth century, the emphasis on surveillance and regulation by the central and local State and civil society in countries such as England, Germany and Austria, shifted – as in the raising of the age of consent for sexual relations – towards protection. However, as reflected in the anti-masturbation campaigns of the period, official discourses still tended to portray the child as ideally asexual and innocent and any sexual feelings as deviant and pathological.⁸

According to this historiography, modern concepts of childhood and adolescence and perceptions of sexual feelings as being an integral part of normal child development only fully emerged at the start of the twentieth century.⁹ The works of Sigmund Freud, with his claim of the existence of sexual feeling in children and his psychoanalytical theories surrounding infantile sexuality, were to be of critical importance in this transition. Freud voiced his claim that ‘germs of sexual impulses are already present in the new-born child’ for the first time in the second of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905.¹⁰ In detail he discussed the first sexual feelings babies and children developed, including thumb-sucking and masturbation which ‘scarcely a single individual escapes’, and suggested that young children might already show some sexual interest in other people, for instance when exhibiting their genitalia or showing curiosity in seeing other people’s genitalia, both of which, he claimed, could appear in ‘normal’ children.¹¹ Freud’s thinking was part of a more general contemporary discussion of child sexuality which began in the second half of the nineteenth century and flourished around 1900 with contributions by sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Albert Moll, who, in 1908, published his magisterial study on The Sexual Life of the Child.¹²

This intellectual reshaping of concepts of child sexuality by sexologists and psychiatrists was to have a significant impact on the ideology of sex educators across Europe in subsequent decades. This impact was reinforced by the increasing attention paid to the sexual feelings of the young by psychologists such as Erik Erikson and Wardell B. Pomeroy, sex-researchers such as the biologist Alfred Kinsey, by the sexologist, Ernest Borneman (Ernst Bornemann), behavioural scientists and educationalists such as Ronald and Juliette Goldman, by sociologists such as Stevi Jackson, and by a variety of anthropologists.¹³ Thus, what had formerly been perceived as a function of immorality and/or as pathological behaviour, was, in the twentieth century, explained as phases in a child’s ‘normal’ development, which, however, could take a pathological turn if certain developmental stages or phases were not experienced or, as in the case of autoeroticism, overcome.¹⁴

Children’s sexual feelings were still perceived as intrinsically vulnerable. They were not embraced as something positive but rather considered as something that required observation and control, even suppression, by their guardians as, for instance, Lennerhed and McEwen exemplify for interwar Sweden and Austria (chapters 4 and 9). Indeed, many medics and social scientists, including educational theorists and practitioners, became increasingly interested in what they perceived as the ‘problem’ of adolescence, especially in relation to crime and to sexuality, where the young could easily go astray. Thus, for policy makers and pedagogues in many Western European countries the scientific recognition of child sexuality was highly problematic. For example, while, as McEwen shows (chapter 9), in interwar Austria, traditional assumptions of sexual innocence might be abandoned by both Catholic and socialist educators, new perceptions of sexual knowledge posed fresh dilemmas for policy makers and practitioners. Similarly, as Gawin argues (chapter 12), for conservative members of the Roman Catholic clergy in Poland new perceptions of child sexuality raised the prospect of sexual enlightenment arousing precocious sexual activity, hence their opposition to any form of sex education other than the moral enlightenment of religious instruction. More generally, as many of the studies in this volume illustrate, the corollary of a new psychology of child sexuality was to question the competence of parents to address issues of sex education and to elevate the role of professional expertise.¹⁵

Only in the second half of the twentieth century and only within ‘progressive’ circles were children given room to explore sexual activities. Under the influence of the theories of the communist and Freudian, Wilhelm Reich, the ‘sexual repression’ of children was understood to be the major cause of human cruelty, an idea the left-wing student movements eagerly assimilated.¹⁶ Indeed, the detrimental effects of sexual repression in childhood on adults in their later life became a recurrent theme in the discourse of sexual radicalism in the late 1960s. In England, the founder of the controversial Summerhill School, Alexander Neill, believed that ‘Heterosexual play in childhood is the royal road [ … ] to a healthy, balanced adult sex life.’ Following the ideas of Freud and Reich, he also perceived sex play amongst small children as ‘a natural, healthy act’. However, he acknowledged that ‘adolescent sex life is not practical today’ but was convinced that ‘it is the right way to tomorrow’s health’.¹⁷ It was in the anti-authoritarian, privately run German kindergartens (Kinderläden) that children actually were allowed to run around naked and explore their bodies sexually. Yet, such practices were exceptional and where, in the 1960s, the sexual behaviour of children was publicised, conservative elements in European society reacted with shock and censure.¹⁸ Adolescence was still considered to be a dangerous and critical period in life, especially as, with the onset of puberty, it was marked by sexual tensions and the development of a sexual identity. Public opinion as well as the...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in the Social History of Medicine
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Shaping the Sexual Knowledge of the Young
• Sex Education, Sexual Rights, Society and the Child
• Shaping Sex Education Policy
• Sex Education and the Representation of Gendered and Sexed Bodies
• Mapping the Sexual Knowledge and Ignorance of the Young
• Index