Childhood Sexuality, Normalization and the Social Hygiene Movement in the Anglophone West, 1900-1935

Abstract

Analysing primary materials from the USA, England and Australia, this paper explores the discursive production of childhood sexuality within the social hygiene movement. Attempts to shape and tame 'the native capacities' of impoverished children into socially acceptable, monogamous heterosexuals functioned as a central tenet of sexual hygiene reform. Habituation provided the pedagogical entry point for hygiene's normalising project. The paper concludes that the body of the child functioned as the rationale through which the proliferation of the increasing management of both the individual and the population was rendered credible within sexual hygiene narratives.