The Emergence of Sex Education: A Franco-Swiss Comparison, 1900–1930

Abstract

A r o u n d 1900 , s e x e d u c A t i o n emerged as the focus of debate in western Europe and the United States, a phenomenon that can be viewed as part of the “discursive explosion” identified by Michel Foucault. In contrast to the salacious or even pornographic evocation of sexuality that had hitherto been dominant in literature and political pamphlets, doctors and philanthropists attempted to make discourse on sexuality respectable for the first time: they treated it as a legitimate object of knowledge, they used what Foucault called an “authorized vocabulary,” and they proposed an analytical approach to the study of sex. Although Foucault did not address sex education in his History of Sexuality, the subject provides an interesting development of the Foucauldian framework. Sex education implies considering not only the content of the message (namely, a scientific language that allows one to talk about sex) but also the identity of the recipient, children and adolescents. Providing sex education seemed to contradict prevailing tendencies to treat childhood and youth as an age of innocence to be preserved as long as possible from the necessarily corrupting realities of the flesh. The “repressive hypothesis” that Foucault challenged actually describes evocations of sexuality addressed to youth up until the end of the nineteenth century. An awkward silence prevailed at the expense of the dissemination of information; young people were forced to learn about sexuality through fragmentary information or abrupt revelations. Thus, talking about sexuality to young people and even teaching it in schools was a real innovation. Scholars such as Lutz Sauerteig, Roger Davidson, and Jeffrey Moran have begun to address this puzzling shift. Among the factors mentioned