A Right Understanding: Teaching Sex Education to South African Youth, 1870-1914

This paper discusses the provision of sex education to middle-class girls and boys in South Africa between the introduction of higher education to middle-class youth in the early 1870s, and 1914. Although there was no wider public or institutional debate about the necessity, or otherwise, of introducing sex education to school curricula, for example, classes and texts on topics such as mothercraft and hygiene were given to young people. Moreover, some groups began to advocate for girls, especially, to be taught about the functioning of their sexual organs in preparation for motherhood. In 1913, the South African women’s suffrage movement recommended that girls be permitted to read books on ‘hygiene’ so that they developed ‘a right understanding of the facts and phenomena of life’.    

This paper argues that tracing the early history of formal sex education in South Africa allows, firstly, for the location of the region within a global circulation of ideas about sex and sexuality. Books on sex hygiene published abroad were read and discussed locally, and teachers at elite schools, many of them trained internationally, brought with them new approaches to teaching human biology and development. Secondly, this study opens a window on to the first manifestations of a South African feminist movement, especially in girls’ schools, where sex education was seen as a means of achieving gender equality.