2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

The focus of this panel is the making of normative sexual identities and practices at the turn of the twentieth century. With papers focusing on the Ottoman Empire, South Africa, and the United States, the panelists examine how sex education was mobilized to shape sexual behavior, courtship, and family formation in the interests of bolstering morally and physically stronger nations. The ‘difficult conversations’ encouraged by the authors of sex education manuals and other advice literature may have brought otherwise taboo topics regarding sex and sexuality into public discourse, but were also intended to reinforce compulsory heterosexuality, celibacy before marriage, and the centrality of the family to society.

However, all three papers suggest that the dissemination of sexual knowledge was not a one-way imposition of ideas. Seçil Yılmaz considers the ways in which medical information about sex, and particularly sexually transmitted disease, was circulated, received, and revised in the Ottoman Empire during the second half of the nineteenth century. Laura M. Ansley’s discussion of the creation of a ‘Progressive youth’ in the United States suggests that educating the young was a key strategy in the construction of ‘wholesome and healthy’ families. Similarly, Sarah Emily Duff notes that sex education provided in the interests of preparing middle-class black and white girls for marriage, opens a window onto early forms of feminism in fin de siècle South Africa.

This panel shows that sex education opens up histories of heterosexuality, tracing the ways in which it has been made, imposed, and contested over time.