Sex education debates and the modest mother in Australia, 1890s to the 1930s

Women's History Review

Volumn 8, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 311-327

  Warne, Ellen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; ATTITUDE TO HEALTH; AUSTRALIA; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; FEMALE; HISTORY; LEGAL ASPECT; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; RELIGION; REPRODUCTION; SEXUAL EDUCATION; SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE; WOMEN'S HEALTH; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

ATTITUDE TO HEALTH; AUSTRALIA; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; RELIGION; REPRODUCTION; SEX EDUCATION; SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES; WOMEN; WOMEN'S HEALTH; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

EID: 34247292804     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612029900200201     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Hannah Chewings (1891) Purity Superintendent's First Report, Minutes of the 3rd Annual Convention of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of South Australia, p. 80 (Adelaide: George Hassell).
2. Judith Smart (1998) Sex, the state, and the 'scarlet scourge': gender, citizenship and venereal diseases regulation in Australia during the Great War, Women's History Review, 7, p. 24.
3. Kerreen Reiger (1985) The Disenchantment of the Home: modernizing the Australian family 1880-1940, p. 181 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press).
4. Peggy Pascoe (1990) Relations of Rescue: the search for female moral authority in the American West 1874-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press).
5. Mary Wood-Allen (1892) Teaching Truth, pp. 8-14 (Melbourne: Signs Publishing Co. Ltd).
6. Report of the 13th Annual Conference of the WCTUof NSW 1895, p. 41.
7. White Cross and White Shield Department, Annual Report of the WCTU of Victoria, 1892, p. 30.
8. Emily Staines (1892) Social Purity Report, Report of the 10th Annual Convention of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of New South Wales, p. 22.
9. The Right Rev. G. M. Long claimed, in 1916, that 'one of our greatest educationists' believed that 'Fear has had a great deal to do in the evolution of man, and it is our bounden duty to utilise it here for all it is worth'. 'How the Church could Co-operate' (1918) Teaching Sex Hygiene: report of a conference organised by the Workers' Education Association, Sydney University, 1916, p. 106 (Sydney: Burrows &Co).
10. See Marina Larsson (1995) 'A source of grim danger': venereal disease and the amateur prostitute, in An iconography of suffering: VD in Australia 1914-1918, master's thesis, Department of History, University of Melbourne, pp. 71-72;
11. and Lucy Bland & Frank Mort (1984) Look out for the 'good time' girl: dangerous sexualities as a threat to national health, in Formations of Nation and People, pp. 131-150 (London: Routledge).
12. For instance, in the period between 1912 and 1918, the following Australian films featured sensational stories about sex: What Women Suffer (1911), Driving a Girl to Destruction (1911), The Sin of a Woman (1912), Remorse, a Story of the Red Plague (1917) and The Woman Suffers (1918), while in 1921 the WCTU despaired of bringing girls up to respect marriage when American films such as The Courtesan, The She-Devil, The Sex Love, The Beast, The Evil Women Do, The Flame of Passion, The Gutter Magdalene, Should a Woman Tell?, What's Your Husband Doing?, Respectable by Proxy, The Virtuous Man, and Virtuous Women, continually undermined marriage. See the 39th Annual Report of the WCTU of NSW, p. 24.
13. Ben Singer (1995) Modernity, hyperstimulus, and the rise of popular sensationalism, in L. Charney & V. R. Schwartz (Eds) Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, p. 94 (Berkeley: University of California Press).
14. My forthcoming doctoral thesis will include a chapter on this issue. For the American campaigns by the WCTU see Alison Parker (1997) Purifying America: women, cultural reform, and pro-censorship activism, 1873-1933, ch. 5 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).
15. Mrs J. Booth (1918) The case for the sex education of the adolescent girl, Teaching Sex Hygiene, pp. 162-163.
16. Mothers in Australia (1919) March, 2, p. 13.
17. Jim Jose (1998) Sex education, the family and the state in early twentieth century South Australia, History of Education Review, 27, pp. 33-54;
18. G. Logan (1981) Sex Education in Queensland: a history of the debate 1900-1980, Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Issues in Queensland Education, No. 2 (Information and Publications Branch, Department of Education, Queensland);
19. Grant McBurnie (1981) 'To make them good men and good women': attempts to introduce sex education into Victorian Government Schools 1900-1930, BA Honours thesis, History Department, Monash University;
20. and Janet Grigg (1986) Growing and knowing: the use of sex education texts in Australia 1920-1939, BA Honours thesis, Department of History, University of Melbourne.
21. Second Progress Report from the Select Committee on Prevalence of Venereal Diseases to the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales. Together with the Proceedings of the Committee and Minutes of Evidence and Appendix (1915) pp. 98-100 (Sydney: William Applegate Gullick, Government Printer).
22. For further discussion of this report see Larsson, 'An iconography of suffering', p. 67.
23. For the WCTU response see E. Alice Blow (1916) 'State President's Report', 34th Report of the Annual Convention of the WCTU of NSW, p. 29;
24. for venereal disease in children see the evidence of Dr Charles Clubbe, Select Committee .on the Prevalence of Venereal Disease, p. 100, item 2022.
25. For a very good study on nineteenth-century attitudes to children with venereal disease see also, Karen Taylor (1985) Venereal disease in nineteenth-century children, Journal of Psychohistory, 12, pp. 431-463.
26. Mrs E. B. Harris (1912) Mothers and daughters - a plea for closer comradeship, The Australasian Young Women's Christian Association Quarterly, October, p. 3 (original emphasis).
27. Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1913) Let parents tell their children, White Ribbon Signal, 1 April, p. 354 (originally published in the New York 'Journal').
28. For instance, see ibid., compared to 'Phineas Fidelity' (1913) White Ribbon Signal, February, p. 317.
29. Long, 'How the Church could co-operate', p. 106.
30. For an early example of church groups forcing parents to take in the facts about venereal disease, see, the Victorian Council of Sex Hygiene and Morality (1913) 'Aspects of a vital question' (Prahran: Victorian Council of Sex Hygiene and Morality).
31. Jeffrey P. Moran (1996) 'Modernism gone mad': sex education comes to Chicago, 1913, Journal of American History, September, p. 511.
32. Reiger The Disenchantment of the Home, p. 181.
33. Moran, 'Modernism gone mad', p. 510.
34. By the early 1890s, the Purity Departments within the WCTU encouraged mothers' meetings, 'held weekly in the homes where mothers assemble, and are both read to and addressed on this subject' to explain matters of hygiene and purity. See the Heredity-Hygiene Department Report (1892) Annual Report of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Victoria, 1892, p. 16.
35. Mothers in Australia (1920) June, Volume III, 4, p. 2.
36. Rev. C. Bernard Cockett (1917) The Association Woman, November, p. 5.
37. See F. C. Spurr (1911) The Red Plague: a lecture delivered by the Reverend F. C. Spurr at the Town Hall, Melbourne, on 25 September 1911 (Melbourne: J. Kemp, Government Publisher);
38. and for the biblical image see D. A Welsh (1918) Massacre of the Innocents, Teaching Sex Hygiene, p. 1.
39. Howes was made a life member of the Otago Institute for her observations and records of natural phenomena for her previous children's book, The Sun 's Babies. See The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (1996) H39, pp. 234-235 (Auckland: Auckland University Press).
40. Edith Howes (1916) The Cradle Ship, p. 25 (London: Cassell).
41. Edith Howes (1916) The Cradle Ship, Ibid., p. 28.
42. Ellen Ross (1992) Good and bad mothers: lady philanthropists and London housewives before World War One, in Dorothy O. Helly & Susan M Reverby (Eds) Gendered Domains: rethinking public and private in women's history, pp. 199-216 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press);
43. Eileen Janes Yeo (1996) The Contest for Social Science: relations and representations of gender and class, p. 145 (London: Rivers Gram Press);
44. see also Marilyn Lake (1993) A revolution in the family: the challenge and contradictions of maternal citizenship in Australia, in Seth Koven, & Sonya Michel (Eds) Mothers of a New World, pp. 378-396 (New York: Routledge).
45. In the story the children first asked their grandmother where the new baby had come from. They were told 'not to be rude', and then, that babies were found under gooseberry bushes. Their own mother, however, said, 'Of course you want to know where babies come from; all boys and girls do'. Later, when the family was flying to 'Babyland' on the 'cradle ship', two characters aptly named Mr and Mrs 'Darken' tried to stop the mission. Their calls to stop and threats that the children would turn out badly if they learnt about reproduction represented the concerns of many conservative participants in the sex education debates leading up to the First World War. Howes tries to explain this belief as the view of 'ignorant people, who think it wrong that children go where they did not go when they were children'. See ibid., pp. 34, 7, and 10-11.
46. Dr Constance Ellis (1915) Woman after the War, The Australasian Women's Quarterly, July, pp. 8-9.
47. Parker, Purifying America, pp. 158-168, 193-194.
48. Irwin Smith (1920) The Story of Ovum and Sperm; and how they grew into the baby kangaroo, stories of birth and sex for children. Part II: the story of sex (Sydney: Australasian League of Honour).
49. Marion Piddington (1925) Tell Them! or the Second Stage of Mothercraft: a handbook of suggestions for the sex training of the child, p. 31 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson).
50. Piddington's view of Freud's ideas may be found in Tell Them!, pp. 4647; Her letter to Freud and his reply are in the Albert Piddington Papers, National Library of Australia, NLA MS 1158; details of her correspondence to Marie Stopes can be found in Ann Curthoys (1989) Eugenics, feminism, and birth control: the case of Marion Piddington, Hecate, 15, pp. 73-89.
51. Piddington, Tell Them!, p. 21.
52. Mrs Laura Annie Bailey, Vice-President of the Women's Vigilance Society, Prahran, which appears to have had links with the Mothers' Union, patrolled cinemas from 1924 on. See items of evidence nos 22711-22721, Commonwealth of Australia, Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry, Minutes of Evidence (1927), pp 848-849 (Canberra: H. J. Green, Government Printer).
53. Mothers in Australia, March 1923, 6, p. 4.
54. Jean H. Forsyth (1921) Training of children, Report of the 39th Annual Convention of the WCTU of NSW, 14-20 September, p. 24.
55. Mothers in Australia (1923), March, 6, p. 5.
56. Dr Flora Innes (1922) Education re facts of life, The Association Woman, 1 November, p. 9.
57. For a contemporary account of the treatment of single mothers see Marion Piddington (1923) The Unmarried Mother and her Child (Sydney: Moore's Book Shop)
58. and for recent work see Shurlee Swain with Renate Howe (1995) Single Mothers and their Children: disposal, punishment and survival in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press);
59. and Gail Reekie (1997) History and the bodies of the illegitimately pregnant woman, Australian Feminist Studies, 12, pp. 77-89.
60. 39th Annual Report of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Victoria, 1925, p. 11.
61. For an earlier advocate of scientific sex education see Dr Constance Ellis, 'Woman after the War', pp. 8-9, and Innes's later opinion in, 'Education re facts of life, p. 9.
62. 'SEX' (sic) Mothers in Australia and New Zealand, 1 September 1932, p. iv.
63. The Mothers' Union recommended books: such as William Robinson (n. d) Christian Marriage (James Clarke & Co.);
64. G. D Rosenthal (n.d) Approach to Marriage (published for the Mothers' Union by the Wykeham Press);
65. Dr Helena Wright (n.d.) The Sex Factor in Marriage (published by Noel Douglas.);
66. Christian Marriage: a message to those about to be married, (n.d) (Ballarat: Baxter & Stubbs);
67. and K. Lewis, (n.d) Your Wedding and After (Sydney: Anglican Truth Society Publications).