'Science is Always Chaste': Sex Education and Sexual Initiation in France, I880s-I930s

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century, a popular marriage manual chastized French mothers for leaving their daughters ignorant about sex. In the 1880s, a Parisian gynaecologist was inspired by a mother 'terrified by the ravages caused by this disastrous ignorance' to publish a book which mothers could give daughters before their weddings. At least a dozen books which young women could read alone, then ask questions about 'without blushing', were published (and usually reprinted several times) into the 1930s. These very proper handbooks can be considered a response to the 'sexual anarchy' of the fin de siecle; they certainly reaffirm marriage and the family as 'a bulwark against sexual decadence' and social disorder.' Sex guides for girls appeared in the USA about a decade later and were regularly published until about 1920. These guides also responded to anxieties about an apparent disintegration of the social order and to new advocates of sexual pleasure as opposed to restraint. Some volumes of the 'Self and Sex Series' were translated into French. By the 1930s, translations of more adultoriented manuals by the English advocate of birth control, Marie Stopes, and other foreign experts, also appeared.2 However, French sex advice for girls not only pre-dated the Anglo-American literature, it also had several distinctive characteristics.