Love, Sex, and Happiness in Education: The Russells, Beacon Hill School, and Teaching “Sex-Love” in England, 1927-1943

TL;DRAbstract

T h e s T o r y o f e a r l y T w e n T i e T h c e n T u r y sex education campaigns has generally been told as a narrative of fear about unruly impulses, innocent children, promiscuity, contamination, and illness. In this story, doctors, educators, social purity activists, politicians, and other intellectuals raise haunting specters of venereal disease, masturbation, prostitution, and various perversions. Historians have rightly pointed to the predominance of abstinence and social purity agendas that have given sex education a conservative character, highlighting the dangers rather than the pleasures of sex. However, this is not that story. In the focus on how sex education has warned children about sex, another story has been eclipsed, namely, the story of how “modern” educators also looked to sex education to facilitate normative heterosexual love. Some “modern” educators sought to nurture, if cautiously, and direct rather than stifle and suppress children’s sexual

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