sex education writers

sex education writers

Exploring the Evolution and Impact of Sex Education Literature

1. Introduction to the History of Sex Education Writing

Moralists rued this first public acknowledgment of sex education. Eventually, the accredited defenders of God and Nature in sexual relationships, the Catholic Church, acknowledged sex education ungracefully at a Vatican conference in 2010: sex education was the “serious duty and ‘proper right’ of parents to teach it to their children.” However, as late as 1955, writing in The Word of the Church for the Archdiocese of New York, Francis J. Connell, C.SS.R., S.T.D., a Doctor of Sacred Theology and a Dean of the School of Sacred Theology at the Catholic University of America, still upbraided the concept of sex education making it clear that the explication of the “graphic facts of life” was the vocation of a “lice specialist” (sic). This hostility continues today, regardless of its irrationality, a case that can and has been argued by scholars like Willy Jansen that there are both theoretical and even scriptural grounds for acceptance of sex education.

The first sex education writers were prehistoric parents urging their children to marry and become fruitful in an ancient world where life was short and dangerous. Educating children about sex, and embarking on the publishing of sex education literature, is clearly a tradition as old as human culture itself, but modern sex education writing began in England in the mid-nineteenth century. Before then, there were no books on sex education. Indeed, there were but a few unillustrated books on gynecology, anatomy or the family. The eighteenth-century French Encyclopédie, for instance, did not have an article on “sex education” or “sex education literature.” In the West, it was not known that the “birds and the bees” require a talk. However, although sex education began in the mid-nineteenth century, it did not acquire public recognition until the late nineteenth century. Indeed, there were no popular sex education books in print until the late 1800s in England.

2. Key Themes and Debates in Sex Education Literature

But which audience? Some attention appears to have been given to girls and boys, parents and children, as readers; much more has been given to the boys who wrote these books, supposedly with males in the forefront of their minds as the readers. From a method of identification, sub-divisions are made along – for example – lines of nationality, authorial gender, religious perspective, scientific versus religious-sex-positive or negative, race or class, etc. Often an interest is shown in such sub-genres, based as they are on authorial identity, as contributing to the basic study of the impact of sex education literature.

Key Themes and Debates: “Sex education literature,” or “physiological and health books for the young,” as they have often been sub-genre-labeled, emerged in the late eighteenth century (in both America and Britain) and has been published widely throughout the English-speaking world since this time. By no means have these books been well received by all. Many older children, function, and even parents, are not “up in arms” over the kinds of books which, authoritatively, had been highly incidental during the first sixty years of the genre. Understandably, most of the significant themes deal in one way or another with the protection of innocence and delay of experience of sex, the education of young girls and boys into, rather than out of, sex by the wearing away of modesty, and the selective application of the facts of life based on sex, race, and class prejudices, middle-class proprieties, and religious ideologies. The basic and overall question, of course, is the impact of these books.

Structure of the Special Collection: The Evolution and Impact of the Genre. The final section of the introduction will explore the key themes and debates in sex education literature which will be explored in this research.

3. The Role of Sex Education Writers in Shaping Public Discourse

The advocates were strong, but funding was a problem. Margaret Sanger wrote in 1936 that sex education in the United States (and in half of Central Park West’s parlor tables) had multiple authorities who, increasingly, “have assumed a doctrinal approach or defensive attitude. What escapes the self-styled experts they dismiss as ‘frankness.'” The punishment for belaboring each other over details had become self-evident: even in private schools that largely escaped the effects of local and state upheaval, “too often sex courses, now being introduced, are reduced to terrible experiences of child guidance experts who want to clarify every minute detail for fear of injuring.” Harry Hoagland, a public health educator, remembered at the end of the Progressive Era the old days of Queer Street grammar Horace Mann: how guides, rather than teachers, had initiated a child into a wider moral world. As in the home, where young-day sexual lore was transmitted piecemeal, direct instruction had its place – it filled in the gaps left by a shocked society. After all, many had heard of self-taught solitaire potty fumbling; there were few willing to share a story from a family cure cabin.

Modern Sex Education, the book sparking this foray into exploring the evolution of sex education literature, makes it clear that there were many forms of sex education before this moment. It is not that sex education writers created anything from scratch, so much as they were part of framing something on which lots of people were working: mothers and daughters and sisters and lovers, teachers and hygienists and social workers, lawyers and judges and doctors and eugenicists. In the Modern Girl – in print, in film reels, in the court room – Purity League organizers and eugenic reformers and Planned Parenthood advocates who ran out of money for volvelle illustrations and so had to improvise embraced the chance to shape her.

4. Case Studies and Analysis of Influential Sex Education Writers

Yet closer examination of influential sex education writers suggests that there are a number of valuable lessons to be learnt concerning the publication of sex education literature from the earliest advocates of age-appropriate, proactive endangerment prevention. These lessons relate to publications and presentations that are not only (hopefully) of service to struggling, perhaps isolated, parents, but are also critical contributions to an expanding field of study that is focused upon the production and reproduction of sex educational theory and praxis. These case studies also offer a nuanced view of the difficulties that such ‘trail-blazers’ may face. In the confrontation with public attitudes of the time, these ‘education pioneers’ sometimes provide a sad record of friendship and support withdrawn. They also offer an illustration of an apparently eternal tension between those who operate from a basis of religious faith, and those who work upon the principles of science, humanism, and power-relations. We chose our cases after extensive initial reading to distinguish between a variety of relevant literature. A ‘duo’ of scientists, Montagu (1895–1975) and Street (1909–2001); an example of a clinician; an early version of a sex-educator, Bates (1859–1952); an ‘asexual figure’ and man of religion, the inaugural Seaman (1893–1978); and a recent example, Reiss (1943–). With each case study, we will provide a brief biography of the figure, showing where possible influences, changes and biographical details.

Despite this diversity, few studies have closely examined writing on sex education, and the field in general seems to have lost many of these original works. This truly represents a gap in the literature on home education, as many writers who wrote about this topic are still discussed at policy, research, and activist levels. Many independent schools and individuals write concerning their existing practice, yet academic research into home education continues to lack a strong normative stance towards these ‘forced’ or ‘naturally led’ aspects of the curriculum. We seek to redress the balance by offering a case study of five influential writers. These historical explorations provide a helpful precedent for potential future investigations to discover, critique, and perhaps build upon the individual philosophies and proposals offered by a new generation of pedagogues in the mid-nineteenth century.

5. Future Directions and Innovations in Sex Education Writing

Finally, the increasing popularity of “literacy autobiographies” as literature may introduce a new subgenre of sex education writing – authors writing not to convey information about sex per se, but about their own sexual education. A particularly poignant example of this is Thandiwe Chama’s 2017 essay “I’m not a virgin, but I’m not a whore: The under-representation of a single sexual experience.” This is extremely rare and may be a testimony to how taboo and stilted our cultural conversations around sex have become. Offering these speculative trends for the future of sex education writing is not an attempt to be exhaustive—indeed, a primary goal of the chapter is to be thought- and conversation-provoking, offering new topics for conversations around the future of the field in which new possibilities in sex education literature might develop.

Looking ahead to the future of sex education literature, several unique and exciting directions present themselves. Though our book focused on English-language literature, significant developments are occurring in the multilingual field of sex education writing. One innovation to keep an eye on is the increasing use of graphic novels to convey sexual information, such as German author and sex ed advocate Lina Nitsche’s three-volume series Junge, was DES können soll (“This is what boys can do!”) that educates boys about sex, love, and more. Another exciting development is the global expansion of sex education writing, representing unpublished authors from more countries and across more continents. Trends such as the “Own Voices” movement, which seeks out and emphasizes the authenticity of authors’ lived experience in the writing of sexual and other experiences, will have an impact on the future of literary and media representation as well. Furthermore, it is safe to predict that the ways in which literature and media are accessed and experienced will continually evolve, and that the literacies and virtualities of the way readers ‘consume’ literature will also affect the practice of writing.