In that sex education both reflects and reinforces sexual ideologies and concerns, its history provides a powerful insight into the prevailing discourses surrounding sexuality in modern society. Within Britain the history of sex education has been deployed to illuminate the medico-moral politics of the early twentieth century and subsequent debates ...
(Show more)In that sex education both reflects and reinforces sexual ideologies and concerns, its history provides a powerful insight into the prevailing discourses surrounding sexuality in modern society. Within Britain the history of sex education has been deployed to illuminate the medico-moral politics of the early twentieth century and subsequent debates surrounding the issue of social hygiene and prophylactic strategies towards VD. While it has figured in the general literature on sexuality and society, such as the studies by Jeffrey Weeks and Lesley Hall, and in studies on AIDS policy, little detailed research has been undertaken on the history of sex education in Britain in the period 1930-80.
This paper, based on a Wellcome Trust-funded project on ‘Health, Sexuality and the State in late Twentieth-Century Scotland’, seeks to explore this field and to identify the major impulses and constraints operating on Scottish policy-makers. Using the files of Scottish health and education departments, it seeks to demonstrate the interplay between varying official perceptions of child sexuality and the extent to which sex education - its content, delivery, and location - was an area of contest between governmental, medical, educational, religious and parental forces within Scottish society. The response of Scottish governance to the perceived breakdown in moral values of the young due to the Second World War and the post-war ‘permissive society’ will be documented. Central issues to be addressed are why policy-makers continued to rely on social purity and social hygiene personnel and ideologies well into the 1960s, and to what extent new moral and medical crisis perceptions relating to the sexual behaviour of the young eroded policy constraints in the 1970s.
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