Ideas of the Early Sex Education Movement in America, 1890-1920

TOWARD THE END of the nineteenth century American sexual attitudes were beginning to undergo fundamental alteration, for the dominant sexual ideology of sex as restraint was being challenged increasingly by the hitherto radical doctrine of sex as pleasure. The implications of this change in ideology extended far beyond the simple gratification of temporal impulse to the very formation of character and the organization of society, for, as Freud wrote, the manner in which an individual responds to sexuality is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction to life. In turn, the nature of society is significantly influenced according to whether society chooses to resolve the conflict between Eros and Ananke by the repression, renunciation, or acceptance of sexuality. (1) By the 1920s in the United States the older middle-class beliefs that sex was only for procreation and that pleasure was an unfortunate, if inescapable, side effect attached to this function simply to ensure reproduction, were being replaced by belief in which pleasure, independent of conception, was as equally legitimate an end of sexual activity in marriage as was procreation. If Freud's hypothesis is correct, then the study of this change in sexual attitudes may offer significant insights into the very structure of man's responses to society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (2)