The facts of life, the sex instruction of Ontario public school children, 1900-1950

grantor: University of TorontoDuring 1900 to 1950 a broad and uneasy coalition of sex reformers--educators, physicians, feminists, sexologists, social workers and public health officials--who identified themselves with the social purity movement prior to the First World War and then with the social hygiene movement after 1918 raised their voices in favour of incorporating sex instruction into Ontario public elementary and secondary schools. The impetus for children's school-based sex instruction was the moral and medical threat posed by what was perceived to be the dreaded corollary of prostitution and the double standard of sexual morality: venereal disease. Sex reformers' discourse on incorporating sex instruction into Ontario public elementary and secondary schools would peak in intensity as venereal disease rates in the civilian and military populations rose co-incident with the First and Second World Wars. This study argues that first, children's sex instruction--variously labelled purity education, sex hygiene, social hygiene, sex education, eugenical instruction and family life education--was heavily influenced by the paternalism, classism and racism of the social purity movement as it came to be constituted after 1885. Second, even when supervised by the social hygiene movement after the Great War, children's sex instruction was predicated upon the post-1885 social purity movement's emphasis on the moral approach to sex reform. This moral approach involved a two-fold undertaking: training the child's will in favour of sexual self-control and imparting rudimentary information on sexual physiology. Third, children's sex instruction was rationalized by the post-1885 social purity movements invoking of three spectres of child-life familiar to middle-class child savers: the child ignorant of sexual matters, the feeble-minded child and the juvenile delinquent. Classed, gendered, racialized and sexualized, these spectres served as "poison containers" or receptacles into which sex reformers poured their anxieties over venereal disease, thus allowing them to conveniently ignore the societal inequalities which contributed to the spread of the malady. As such, between 1900 and 1950, sex instruction, or what British sexologist Havelock Ellis termed "the instruction of children in the essential facts of life," had less to do with teaching children about sexual anatomy, biology, physiology and psychology and much more to do with channelling Canadians toward compulsory heterosexuality, reproducing the patriarchal nuclear family, maintaining the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon race, building a healthy, patriotic citizenry and protecting the nation state from harm.Ph.D