SEX EDUCATION
From Philosopedia
SEX EDUCATION
Annie Besant was an advocate of birth control, and she toured and lectured widely. In her time, however, most of the uneducated learned about birth control through advertisements in urinals and drug stores, and on posters. In 1877, when she stood trial for advocating birth control and was acquitted, manufacturers launched a sales drive. Michael Mason, in The Making of Victorian Sexuality (1995), reasons that abstinence did not find favor with wives. One York wife was quoted as saying, “Self-restraint? . . . not much! If my husband started on self-restraint, I should jolly well know there was another woman in the case.”
Mason found that rationalist W. R. Greg regarded celibacy as a “social gangrene.” The Reverend Charles Kingsley celebrated the joys of physical lovemaking with his wife; but if it was not so enjoyable, how on earth could frailer creatures be restrained? So although the Anglican clergy deplored celibacy—a Roman practice—they backed restraint and later marriage, and deplored sensuality. On this the high-minded agnostics, such as George Eliot, were their allies.
George Drysdale, a precursor of Havelock Ellis, argued in the 1880s that sexual abstinence could cause lesions in the sexual organs. Mason denies that Victorian women were ignorant or joyless, but he admits that many doctors were opposed to birth control, and they were enraged when Bertrand Russell’s father declared in 1868 that they ought to favor it. They were too scared of a charge of impropriety to make a vaginal examination. They also feared their patients would desert them for quacks—and on sexual matters quacks have abounded.
{Noel Annan, “Under the Victorian Bed,” The New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995}
