An introduction to sex education.

  • Richmond, Winifred V. (Winifred Vanderbilt), 1876-1945.
Date:
[1936]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: An introduction to sex education. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    abounded. Under Christianity it was an instrument of the devil, cunningly devised for man’s destruction, or a high and holy office to be exercised only under priestly sanction and in accordance with Divine Law. If to-day we have a body of knowledge that at last makes possible something of a scien¬ tific attitude toward the problems of sex, we are still only at the beginnings, and there is a long road to be travelled before man will have knowledge and courage enough to realize his sexual possibilities. But what are some of the practical things that emerge from a study of the biology and the history and the psychology of sex? First of all perhaps the realization that in the sex sphere as in all other departments of human life people succeed or fail not so much by reason of what they do as of what they are. The child is the result of the combination and inter¬ action of certain chemical and electrical (biological) forces. He has behind him not only his human ancestry, but the longer and broader line of living creatures who were man’s progenitors and with whom he yet has much in common. Behind the infant human being is also the weight of human history, of the unknown thousands of years during which man has striven now in this direction and now in that; so that the child born to-day is indubitably ‘the heir of all the ages’, but he inherits the results of the mistakes and failures of the ages as well as of the successes. He is born into a psychological situation which, through the attitudes and reactions of his parents, has begun to shape and mould him even before he arrives, and which presses upon him from all sides while he is still helpless to combat it. And sur¬ rounding even this is the broader cultural environment which has shaped his parents and will stamp him for life