This ground-breaking work provides the first history of ideas about the sexual child in modernity. Beginning with twenty-first century panics about sexualization, the authors address why the sexual child excites such powerful emotions in the Anglophone west.

"Teaching Moral Sex is the first comprehensive study to focus on the role of religion in the history of public sex education in the United States. It examines religious contributions to national sex education organizations from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, highlighting issues of public health, public education, family, and the role of the state. It details how public sex education was created through the collaboration of religious sex educators-primarily liberal Protestants, along with some Catholics and Reform Jews-with "men of science," namely physicians, biology professors, and social scientists. Slominski argues that the work of early religious sex educators laid foundations for both sides of contemporary controversies regarding comprehensive sexuality education and abstinence-only education. In other words, instead of casting religion as merely an opponent of sex education, this research shows how deeply embedded religion has been in sex education history and how this legacy has shaped terms of current debates. By focusing on religion, this book introduces a new cast of characters into sex education history, including Quaker and Unitarian social purity reformers, the Young Men's Christian Association, military chaplains, the Federal Council of Churches, and the National Council of Churches. These religious sex educators made sex education more acceptable to the public and created the groundwork for recent debates through their strategic combination of progressive and restrictive approaches to sexuality. Their contributions helped to spread sex education and influenced major shifts within the movement, including the mid-century embrace of family life education"--

This book is a broad-ranging history of moral regulation focusing on Britain and the US.

Studying a broader period than its contemporaries, this comprehensive study reveals a neglected tradition of British women’s writing from the Victorian era to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Outspoken Women brings together the many and varied non-fictional writings of British women on sexual attitudes and behaviour, beginning nearly a hundred years prior to the ‘second wave’ of feminism. Commentators cover a broad range of perspectives and include Darwinists, sexologists, and campaigners against the spread of VD, as well as women writing about their own lives and experiences. Covering all aspects of the debate from marriage, female desire and pleasure, to lesbianism, prostitution, STDs, and sexual ignorance, Lesley A. Hall studies how the works of this era didn’t just criticise male-defined mores and the ‘dark side’ of sex, but how they increasingly promoted the possibility of a brighter view and an informed understanding of the sexual life. Hall’s remarkable anthology is an engaging examination of this fascinating subject and it provides students and scholars with an invaluable source of primary material.

The history of sex education enables us to gain valuable insights into the cultural constructions of what different societies have defined as 'normal' sexuality and sexual health. Yet, the history of sex education has only recently attracted the full attention of historians of modern sexuality. Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe makes a considerable contribution not only to the cultural history of sexual enlightenment and identity in modern Europe, but also to the history of childhood and adolescence. The essays collected in this volume treat sex education in the broadest sense, incorporating all aspects of the formal and informal shaping of sexual knowledge and awareness of the young. The volume, therefore, not only addresses officially-sanctioned and regulated sex education delivered within the school system and regulated by the State and in some cases the Church, but also the content, iconography and experience of sexual enlightenment within the private sphere of the family and as portrayed through the media.