`Science is Always Chaste`: Sex Education and Sexual Initiation in

381
Mary Lynn Stewart
’Science is Always Chaste’: Sex Education
and Sexual Initiation in France,I880s-I930s
In the mid-nineteenth century,
a popular marriage manual chastized French
mothers for leaving their daughters ignorant about sex. In the 1880s, a
Parisian gynaecologist was inspired by a mother ’terrified by the ravages
caused by this disastrous ignorance’ to publish a book which mothers could
give daughters before their weddings. At least a dozen books which young
women could read alone, then ask questions about ’without blushing’, were
published (and usually reprinted several times) into the 1930s. These very
proper handbooks can be considered a response to the ’sexual anarchy’ of the
fin de siècle; they certainly reaffirm marriage and the family as ’a bulwark
against sexual decadence’ and social disorder.’1
Sex guides for girls appeared in the USA about a decade later and were
regularly published until about 1920. These guides also responded to anxieties
about an apparent disintegration of the social order and to new advocates of
sexual pleasure as opposed to restraint. Some volumes of the ’Self and Sex
Series’ were translated into French. By the 1930s, translations of more adultoriented manuals by the English advocate of birth control, Marie Stopes, and
other foreign experts, also appeared.’ However, French sex advice for girls not
only pre-dated the Anglo-American literature, it also had several distinctive
characteristics.
First, almost all these sex manuals were clearly addressed to bourgeois girls.
Some manuals explicitly excluded peasant girls on the grounds that they knew
about sexuality from observing farm animals coupling (despite the fact that
the same manuals do not depict or describe copulation). Working-class girls
figured in most of these books as the shady other women of ’easy virtue’.
Obviously, economic considerations about who could afford to buy books
influenced the publishers. Two fashionable gynaecologists offered another
revealing rationale for the focus on bourgeois girls: as ’hothouse plants’ they
matured early and encountered ’worldly distractions’. Conversely, peasant
1
A. Debay, Philosophie du mariage (faisant suite à l’hygiène du mariage) (Paris 1865), 90-1
and 118-19; Dr Goupil, Les trois âges de la femme. Première partie: L’âge de formation (Paris
1886), 6-7, and Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle
(London 1991), 3.
2
Patricia J. Campbell, Sex Education Books for Young Adults, 1892-1979 (New York 1979),
6-8. Several of Mary Wood-Allen’s titles were translated, as well as Mane Stopes, trans. Cecil
Georges Bazile, L’Amour et le mariage (new edn, Paris 1934), and Dr T.H. Van De Velde, Le
Mariage parfait. Etude sur sa physiologie et sa technique (1930).
382
girls developed later and lived a more sheltered life. The same gynaecologists
casually dismissed working-class girls, saying that their working and living
conditions introduced them to ’pernicious contacts which resulted in premature sexual relations’, including coerced sex and incest.’ The sex guides themselves did not acknowledge sexual harassment in the workplace (as opposed,
for example, to at balls) or incest.
Second, sex advice ostensibly directed at French girls in their late teens to
early twenties was also designed to coach their mothers in how to answer their
daughters’ questions. The French preferred maternal instruction in girls’
hygiene, defined as girls’ physical and moral education, in some cases from the
age of five or six years, when many biologists claimed that sex differences
began to emerge, but definitely from the age of puberty.4 In the twentieth
century, several books were addressed to mothers and daughters, and a new
generation of women’s health manuals introduced chapters on sex intended, in
part, to help mothers to enlighten their daughters.
A third distinguishing feature of French sex advice for girls was complaints
that mothers postponed instruction in sexual life until their daughters’
weddings. Although the experts advocated earlier ’initiation’, many deferred
to custom by calling their works guides for fiancees and thereby deflected
charges of advocating promiscuity. One premarital manual reported that
mothers asked their confessors: ’Why trouble and scandalize them [their
daughters], possibly filling them with disgust for marriage?’ Like many French
people, these mothers believed that speaking to a young girl about sexuality
stripped her of innocence.’ Another author reported that mothers waited until
the wedding, then whispered confusing and frightening things to the new
bride: ’Don’t be afraid, dear,
love has its duties.’6 Such accounts suggest
that mothers had unhappy memories of their own wedding nights or low
expectations of sexual initiation.
Medical popularizers known as hygienists wrote most of these books for
mothers and daughters; a minority of the accessible authors were gynaecologists. A higher proportion of French than American authors were medical
men. Most of these hygienists paid more attention to pregnancy and birth than
to menstruation or sexual intercourse.~Nevertheless, eight of the nine health
manuals written by female physicians contained sections on menstruation and
...
Lefebre, La puberté chez la femme (Paris 1897), 66-73.
See, for example, J.-B. Fonssagrives,
L’éducation physique des jeunes filles ou Avis aux mères
(Paris 1869), v and vii; Jules Rochard, ’L’éducation des filles’, Revue de deux mondes (1February
1888), 651 and 661-3; Mme Hyppolyte Meunier, Le docteur au village. Entretiens familiers sur
l’hygiène (Paris 1880), 3; Dr Edmond Caubet, Hygiène de la femme (Paris 1894), 1; and G.M.
Bessède, L’instruction sexuelle à l’école et dans la famille (Paris 1920), 87.
5
Abbé Charles Grimaud, Aux mères et aux leurs grandes jeunes filles, futures épouses (19th
edn, Paris 1927), 24-5, 31, 140-3, 181, 186, 190-3, and 282. On beliefs about girls’ innocence,
see Anne Martin-Fugier, La bourgeoisie: Femme au temps de Paul Bourget (Paris 1983), 56.
6
Dr A. Coriveaud, Le lendemain du mariage. Etude d’hygiène (Paris 1884) (also 1889, 1898,
1910 and 1927), 9-16.
7
Dr Léon Bourgeois, Conseils pratiques à l’usage des jeunes femmes et des jeunes mères (Paris
3
4
Dr Charles Barbaud and Dr Charles
383
’marital’
sex. Only one of these eight physicians counselled sexual pleasure as
goal in itself, independent of reproduction, but all eight tried to assure some
degree of female comfort in sexual intercourse.
A fourth difference from American sex education for girls was competition
between experts. Since the eighteenth century, French hygienists had competed
a
with male clerics as moral and sexual counsellors. Whatever French women
thought about practical sexual advice from (theoretically) celibate male clerics,
many accepted their authority. One reason for the ’feminization’ of Catholic
observance in the nineteenth century
the best estimate is that women
accounted for nearly two-thirds of the French communicants at Easter Mass in
1900 - was the Church’s attitude toward sexuality. After 1830, the Church’s
prohibition of coitus interruptus, the most common form of birth control, fell
more heavily on men than on women. Earlier, the Tridentine reforms had
imposed a new sexual ethic that provided some protection from sexual assault
by rowdy gangs of young men.8 Finally, the Church appealed to mothers by
according them responsibility for sexual instruction, under clerical guidance.
French clerics counselled chastity before marriage and continence in
marriage. Hoppenot’s Little Catechism on Marriage recommended chaste
marital sex, ’for the purposes God prescribed’, namely procreation, not
’voluptuousness’. This catechism was reprinted 19 times and recommended
widely between 1908 and the mid-1930s. In a storybook entitled For Young
Girls: Toward Marriage, most stories extolled the celibate life. The pivotal
story told of the ’wise virgin’ who decided to marry ’because ... she had been
called to sacrifice herself’.9
After the first world war, an active lobby composed of clerics and lay
Catholic professionals, primarily physicians and educators, published less
dour pamphlets. While Association for Christian Marriage pamphlets agreed
that marriage required self-sacrifice, they assured girls that love ’embellishes
and transforms the sacrifice’. They claimed that ’suppressing carnal pleasure,
under the pretext of purity, would distort the divine plan’. Of course, the
young girl still had to enter into the marriage ’intact in body and soul’. The
ideal was to marry a young man ’who is a virgin and a Christian’.&dquo;
To establish their authority on the subject of sex and to alleviate concerns
about offending feminine modesty, secular authors appealed to science. Some
hygienists promptly assured their readers that ’science is always chaste. Do not
-
1908); and
de
Dr Maurice
Favreau, Ce qu’il est indispensable de savoir sur l’hygiène de la femme et
l’enfant (Bordeaux 1924).
Angus McLaren, Sexuality and Social Order: The Debate Over the Fertility of Women and
Workers in France, 1770-1920 (New York 1983), 44-5; and Ralph Gibson, ’Le catholicisme et les
femmes en France au XIXe siècle’, Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France, 79, 202 (January-June
1993), 63-93.I should like to thank Judith Stone for drawing this article to my attention.
9
J. Hoppenot, Petit catéchisme du mariage (Paris 1908), 173-8; and Jean Charruau, Aux
jeunes filles. Vers le mariage (Paris 1904), 228 and 288-9.
10 Edward Montier, Le mariage. Lettre à une jeune fille (Paris 1919), 2-18. The AMC
8
published many Montier pamphlets.
384
blush, madame, your modesty has nothing to fear.’&dquo; Apart from employing
terminology and avoiding ’shocking’ language, they discussed sexual
more
than sexual performance. Almost total silence on performance
parts
reflected
a cultural consensus against young women knowing the
clearly
details about intercourse. Similarly, women’s health guides devoted more space
to describing women’s internal sex organs in order to explain pregnancy and
birth, than to describing their external genitalia, even to help women prepare
for penetration. At most, health guides prescribed scrupulous cleansing of the
vulva to prevent vaginal discharge causing irritation and infection, and to
avoid disgusting or infecting their spouses. The prescription was as much
about masculine pleasure as about feminine safety.
Like gynaecology texts, sex and health manuals depicted women’s ovaries
and uterus, but were less graphic about women’s external genitalia. The 1905
translation of a manual by a Swiss doctor, Anna Fischer, included a line drawing of external female genitalia: the 1924 edition eliminated the drawing with
the explanation that it was ’of a purely technical order’. The illustration was
typically medical, in so far as it represented disembodied body parts, albeit in
less detail. The few illustrations of women’s external genitalia that appeared in
French women’s health guides in the 1930s were similarly ‘technical’.’2 The
paucity of these images clearly reflected more than the general inhibition about
reproducing medical images of any kind or artistic representations of the
’sexual triangle’ for public consumption; it expressed the authors’ indifference
to non-vaginal sexual expression. American guides also avoided visual aids on
genitalia and exploration of non-vaginal sexual expression, suggesting a
degree of international consensus on this.’3
Guides for girls and women were even more hesitant about naming and
depicting the penis, or disclosing the physiology of erection, than they were
about female organs and arousal. The sensible suggestion to instruct brides-tobe about erections was very suspect when it was initially proposed after the
first world war. With mounting concern about venereal diseases, women’s
health guides gradually introduced details of the masculine genital system. 14
The few authors who explained why talking about intercourse or genitalia
Latin
11 Alexis Clerc, Hygiène et médecine des deux
chaste’ was reiterated by Bessède, op. cit., 7.
sexes
(Paris 1885), 5. Clerc’s phrase ’Science is
12 Dr Anna Fischer, trans. Doctoresse Louise Azema, La femme, médecin du foyer (Paris 1905),
VII and 259-60, and (1924), 259. See also P. Aulaire, La leçon d’amour: Traité d’instruction et
d’éducation sexuelles (Paris 1930), 171ff; and Dr Charles Platon and Dr Antoine Lacroix, Le
sauvetage de la femme (Paris 1934), 82ff.
13 On inhibitions about public display of medical images,
see Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual
(Madison, WI 1989), 136-7; on privatizing artistic representations of the sexual triangle,
see Lmda Nochlin, ’Courbet’s L’origine du monde: The Origin without an Original’, October,
1985, 77-86 (even though the painting has since been discovered); and on American parallels,
Visions
Campbell, op. cit., 23 and 48.
Sereno, Ce qu’une femme doit savoir (Paris 1909), viii; Dr M. Schultz, Hygiène générale
Paris 1909), 9-11; Dr Helina Gaboriau, Les trots âges de la femme (Paris
1923), 6, 38-40, and 93; and Mme Houdré-Boursin, Ma doctoresse. Guide pratique d’hygiène et
de médecine de la femme moderne (Strasbourg 1930), 90ff.
14
Dr
de la
femme (2nd edn,
385
offended modesty, criticized ’hypocritical customs’ that treated sex as a
’shameful secret’. Some admitted that the shame derived from Catholic belief
in the opposition between the body and soul and warnings against ’the
seductive aspects of pleasure’. Others alluded to the contribution of the
Church’s emphasis on purity to brides’ ignorance about sex. 15
In fact, scientific sex advisers often agreed with clerical positions. Hygienists
recommended purity, just in more practical terms of cleanliness in the pubic
region, because they believed masturbation began with scratching dirty or
infected spots. (They were less concerned about girls’ than boys’ masturbation,
because girls did not suffer the ’seminal losses’ that, hygienists claimed,
’caused profound debility’ in boys. )’6 Hygienists favoured premarital chastity
for girls, and even advised them to arm themselves against temptation and
sexual assault. The military language reflected anxieties about female sexual
desires and cultural convictions, reinforced by some medical opinion, that
abstinence was impossible or harmful for young men. 17
Almost all scientific advisers championed marriage, either as a religious rite
or as ’the foundation stone of the social edifice’. Like clerical counsellors, they
contended that the purpose of marriage was procreation. Several threatened
fallen wombs, cysts and cancers in women, and genital infections, impotence
and sterility in men who practised birth control. According to a pre-war and
an interwar doctor, even coitus interruptus left the genital system of both
partners in a pathological state of hypertension.&dquo; Most hygienists avoided
advocacy of birth control or of feminine sexual gratification independent of
reproduction. One who contended that science would end the subjugation of
women, promptly denied any association with ’extravagant feminism’.&dquo;’ Dr
Mayoux tried to distance himself from a minority of neo-Malthusian feminists
like Dr Madeleine Pelletier, Nelly Roussel and Gabrielle Petit, who demanded
the ’freedom to choose maternity’, women’s right to control their bodies, and
the legalization of abortions. Pelletier separated female sexual pleasure from
reproduction and spoke of the wedding night as ’a legal rape’.20
15 Dr E. Sterian, L’éducation sexuelle (Paris 1910), 2-3; Dr Henri Fischer, Hygiène d’enfance:
L’éducation sexuelle (Paris 1903), 20; Dr Mayoux, L’éducation des sexes (Paris 1906), 10; Dr
Jeanne Stéphani-Cherbuliz, Le sexe a ses raisons. Instruction et éducation sexuelles (Paris 1934),
20-7.
16 Une
doctoresse, Le guide médical de la femme et de la famille (Paris c. 1922), 269; Mlle A.
Quint, Manuel d’hygiène et d’enseignement social (Paris 1914), 61; Barbaud and Lefebre, op. cit.,
69-70.
17 Dr L.
Mathé, L’enseignement de l’hygiène sexuelle à l’école (2nd edn,
Paris
1912), 109; and
Sterian, op. cit., 146-7.
18 Dr N. Eddé, Hygiène des maladies de la femme (Paris 1922), 106; and Mayoux, op. cit., 269.
See also Dr Marcellin Camboulives, L’homme et la femme à tous les âges de la vie (Paris 1890),
253 and 271-3; Schultz, op. cit., 48-76; Dr Serge-Paul, Physiologie de la vie sexuelle chez
l’homme et chez la femme (Paris 1910), 111ff.
19 Mayoux, op. cit., 13-19.
20 Ann Cova, ’De la libre maternité à la désagrégation de la famille’ in Christine Bard (ed.),
Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939); Logique et infortunes d’un combat pour l’égalité (Paris 1992),
76-84.
386
In certain respects, the scientific
approach was positive about feminine
French bio-medical texts accepted women’s capacity for sexual
arousal and identified several feminine erogenous zones. Erotic manuals for
men drew parallels between the physiology of sexual arousal in men and
or required
romance to precede
women, but explained that women liked
physical arousal. Although only Dr Anna Fischer admitted that women had
a sexual instinct
and that they did not need to feel ashamed about it
most sex advice for girls was predicated on anxiety about feminine sexual
desire.
However, scientists did not have much clinical data on the physiology of
sexual relations, and they interpreted what data they had in highly gendered
ways. For instance, they found that sperm were ’mobile’ and ’lively’, and ova
were ’inert and inanimate’. From this finding filtered through crude gender
stereotypes, they concluded that in copulation women ’remain blissfully
passive, savouring, tranquilly, all the pleasure we dispense’.2’ Scientists knew
that conception could occur without the female orgasm. Since conception was
the desired result, few expressed concern about women not being satisfied,
although a 1938 survey found that half the 530 French women questioned,
never or rarely reached orgasm.22
Furthermore, many French hygienists were evolutionists for whom the
species was everything and women were ’made for reproduction’. Only Dr
Fischer took the evolutionary position one step further, arguing that women in
civilized societies did not need to devote themselves to reproduction and
should use contraception.23 Several French proponents of sex education were
eugenists and racists; at least one became a critic of interracial marriage in
the 1930s. Still, none advocated sterilization or contraception to prevent
’degeneration’, as did several of their Anglo-American counterparts. Instead,
the French promoted medical examinations before marriage and banning
marriages of tubercular or syphilitic people.24
Unlike clerics, scientific sex advisers were opposed to lifelong chastity. Some
predicted insomnia, indigestion, menstrual troubles, migraines, hysteria, etc.
in abstinent women. Dr Gaboriau told of passionate but celibate women
adopting ’habits of solitary voluptuousness ... which alter their health and
can cause mental problems’. By the 1930s, there was a more positive variation:
a ’physiological law’ required the regular exercise of all organs for a sound
sexuality.
-
-
-
-
constitution.&dquo;
Appeals
21
22
to
science
were
quite persuasive
in the
early
twentieth century,
as
Aulaire, op. cit., 757.
Clerc, op. cit., 276-93; Mayoux, op. cit., 158ff; Dr M.J. Watson, Ce que tout jeune homme
doit savoir à l’âge de la puberté. Éducation sexuelle de l’adolescence (Paris n.d.), 32ff. The survey
is reported in Laure Adler, Secrets d’alcove: Histoire du couple de 1830 à 1930 (Paris 1983), 95-6.
23 Corivaud, op. cit., 4; Edde, op. cit., 97-105; Fischer (1905), 256-8 and 264.
24 René Martial, Vie et constance des races (4th edn, Paris 1939); Dr Henry Cazalis, La science
et le mariage. Etude médicale (Paris 1900), 7 and 55; and Mayoux, op. cit., 189-95.
25 Gaboriau, op. cit., 96-7; Marestan, op. cit., 37-48; Stéphani-Cherbuliz, op. cit., 67.
387
the
changing
tone
of Catholic
Association for Christian
marriage manuals
Marriage manuals denied
attests.
In the
1920s,
opposition between
religious and scientific truth. But the more traditional and influential assembly
of French cardinals and archbishops rejected the prospect of ’scientific
initiation’ on the grounds that it would be morally neutral. ’Even worse, it
may promulgate ... physiological laws (such as the impossibility or dangers of
an
continence) contrary to truth as much as the moral order.’26
Because of its focus on premarital sex education, French sex advice for girls
concentrated more than its American counterparts on sexual initiation. As a
consequence, the contradictions inherent in all contemporary girls’ sex advice
are more apparent. Virtually all the premarital manuals advocated female
virginity before marriage, then expected conjugal relations on the wedding
night. Although many noted that there might be problems with educating girls
for chastity then suddenly expecting them to perform conjugal duties, few proposed any solution beyond maternal or occasionally public sex education.
Conversely, most premarital manuals assumed that young single men would be
familiar with ’easy love’. Only an interwar feminist doctor spotlighted the
double sexual standard. ’While we shame the young girls, we laughingly
compliment the gay blade who knows how to &dquo;confirm&dquo; girls.’2’
Hygienists had serious concerns about marital sexual initiation. The author
of a book on ’the day after the wedding’ reassured his readers that their
husbands would use tender caresses. But Dr Coriveaud asked, ominously,
what happened to their friends whose husbands considered the wedding night
’a sort of savage rutting’? He answered with a phrase from a mid-nineteenthcentury (male) feminist: ’a veritable rape’ which hurt and even permanently
scarred brides. Physicians familiar with these ’infections and injuries’ called
them ’ballistic uterine inflammations’. Into the 1920s gynaecologists reported
haemorrhages, lesions, infections, and perforations of internal organs from
brutal wedding nights, but only radical neo-Malthusians repeated the term
rape.28
Medical interest in genital complications reflected new theories based on
Pasteur’s germ theory, that microbes could infiltrate the uterus with negative
and female novelists
repercussions for foetuses.29 Female physicians
that
initiations
caused
to resist intercourse
women
painful
explained
young
and added, apparently to be persuasive, that frigidity reduced the chance of
pregnancy.3° Both ’the scientific conviction that germ poisons filter through the
placenta’ and the rhetoric linking frigidity to infertility reflected widespread
-
-
Dr H. Abrand, Aux parents et aux éducateurs. Education de la pureté et préparation au
mariage (Paris 1922), 22-34; and Ganay, op. cit., 5-7.
27 Houdré-Boursin, op. cit., 128.
28 Dr A. Siredey, L’hygiène des maladies de la femme (Paris 1907), 28-9. Aulaire also referred
26
’licit’ rape.
29 Claire Salomon-Bayet, Pasteur et la révolution pastorienne (Paris 1986); Bruno Latour, The
Pasteurization of France (Cambridge 1988); Platon and Lacroix, op. cit., 24-9.
30 For example, Dr Marthe Francillon-Lobre, Hygiène de la femme et de la jeune fille (Paris
1909), 122-5. On novels, see Adler, op. cit., 33-5 and 51.
to
388
fear of a natality crisis. Military defeats in 1866 and 1870 had increased existing disquiet about depopulation in the first major country to experience a
secular decline in its birth rate. Census reports revealed that France had a
than the former and future
lower birth rate
and lower marital natality
enemy, Germany. In the early twentieth century, a war that deprived France of
several million inhabitants fuelled natalist campaigns. 31
Other French literature on sexuality expressed an interest in sexual
initiation. Guides for youths and fiances emerged about 20 years after guides
for girls and fiancees, unlike their American counterparts, which appeared
coterminously. One reason for the 20-year gap may be that some French
manuals which were allegedly for both sexes actually assumed a male readership. In addition, an earlier but still flourishing subgenre of manuals on the
erotic arts may have been read by young men. Increasing bellicosity prompted
the publication of sex guides for boys in France, as it did in Teddy Roosevelt’s
America.32 Additionally, French doctors worried about young men having
homosexual contacts and prescribed early marriage as a preventive measure.33
Parenthetically, sex guides for girls were less concerned about homosexuality. The only one that openly discussed lesbianism simply repudiated the
traditional prejudice about lesbians’ ’wasting themselves’. This asymmetry
reversed the representation of homosexuality in the pornographic literature of
the fin de siècle. In this literature of ’raw debauch’, masculine homosexuality
was taboo, whereas the ’femme viscieuse’ whose lesbian habits and heterosexual demands drained masculine vitality and virility, was ubiquitous. Even
in the early twentieth century, hygiene texts called the belief that men ’owe’
their wives daily conjugal relations (except during menstrual periods) ’one of
the most monstrous and dangerous health scandals’.34 The complement to
anxiety about loss of sperm and therefore masculinity was fear of immoderate
feminine sexual demands.
Guides for fiances paid much attention to the hymen, which biologists
and hygienists asserted had to be ruptured for penetration, ensuring that
’entrance into marriage is normally bloody’. For some prewar hygienists, the
hymen remained ’the best proof of feminine virginity’. One offered brides a
-
-
Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York 1993),
77-83; Colin Dyer, Population and Society in Twentieth-Century France (New York 1978), 50
31
and 78.
32 For example, Dr P. de Bourgogne, Aux fiancés. Conseils médicaux d’hygiène pratique. Ce
que tout homme doit savoir (Paris 1913); and A. Calmette, Simple causerie pour l’éducation
sexuelle des garçons (Paris 1920). See also Campbell, op. cit., 34.
33 Dr E. Sterian, L’éducation sexuelle (Paris 1910), 23-4, 36ff, 50-3, 63-4, 77, 79ff; and
Stéphani-Cherbuliz, op. cit., 192-3. See also Annalise Maugue, L’identité masculine en crise au
tournant du siècle (Paris 1987).
34 Platon and Lacroix, op. cit., 59-61; and Dr J. Hericourt, L’hygiène moderne (Paris 1908),
93-5. On pornography, see Annie Stora-Lamarre, L’Enfer de la IIIe République. Censeurs et
pornographes (1881-1914) (Paris 1990), 31 and 38-9; and Antony Copley, Sexual Moralities in
France, 1780-1980. New Ideas on the Family, Divorce, and Homosexuality. An Essay on Moral
Change (London 1989), 85.
389
recipe for faking a rupture; another told grooms to check for fraudulent
virgins by taking the bloody linens to a laboratory to be tested. This myth of a
necessarily traumatic initiation probably induced some men to be rough and
insensitive to their partner’s discomfort.35 To the extent that young women
knew the myth, it probably increased muscular tension in anticipation of being
hurt, which would have intensified any pain. Fortunately, interwar gynaecologists insisted that hymens could break before sexual initiation and that
’defloration’ should be accomplished by dilation instead of tearing.36
Unfortunately, guides for grooms did not list alternatives to or more considerate methods of penetration. The only suggestion about ’supplementary
satisfaction’ from ’agile hands and tongue’, was followed by a disingenuous
denial that the author recommended these ’improper’ practices. Only radical
advocates of sex education and manuals on the erotic arts described the preliminaries to and various positions for copulation. Although they favoured the
missionary position, they indicated other positions if the ’normal’ one was
impossible, for instance, in late pregnancy.&dquo;
Fin de siècle pornography also fixated on sexual initiations of young virgins.
Whereas sex advice books criticized brutal initiations of brides out of concern
about reproductive repercussions, pornography celebrated the ’seduction’ of
single virgins with no consideration of reproduction. The difference was
partly due to antithetical attitudes toward respectability, with sex advisers
flogging it and pornographers flaunting it. Indeed, to forestall suspicions that
their works were prurient, sex advisers stressed that their purpose was to
promote health and/or to alleviate the ’misery’ of modern marriage. But sex
advisers, like anti-pornography propagandists, went beyond denouncing individual physical and psychological damage to decry the demographic and social
consequences.&dquo;
Like American experts, French experts expected brides to be virginal but,
unlike the Americans, (non-clerical) French experts expected grooms to be
familiar with ’easy love’ and ’ignorant of feminine delicacy’. Accordingly, they
urged grooms to conduct the initiation slowly and gently. A 1913 guide told
the new husband to explain the sexual act, clearly articulating who the teacher
would be, if not the mother. Dr Bourgogne also advised the groom to hide his
impatience, even wait several nights, if the bride remained fearful, for her
’expressed or tacit’ consent was required. Few shared Bourgogne’s confidence
in bridegrooms’ restraint: ’The delights of the first possession without obstacle
make the most self-contained man lose control.’ Others noted that insecure
men would consider waiting a sign of impotence. Another problem with
Bourgogne’s scenario was potential misunderstandings about tacit consent,
35 Sterian, op. cit., 110-19; Dr Georges Surbled, La vie à deux. Hygiène du mariage (5th edn,
Paris 1911), 55. Paul Reboux raised the possibility of sadism in Le nouveau savoir-aimer (Paris
1938), 36.
36
37
38
Edde, op. cit., 96-7.
Aulaire, op. cit., 118; Marestan, op. cit., 34; Clerc, op. cit., 280-1.
Bourgogne, op. cit., 9; Surbled, op. cit., V; Stora-Lamarre, op. cit., 65ff.
390
given assumptions about women being ’the passive agent of the common
operation’.39
A more popular metaphor was mastery of a musical instrument. Dr Mayoux
felt it took ’an adroit and supple hand to make this delicate instrument vibrate’.
At least a musical instrument was not as easily manipulated as the ’robot’ or
’doll’ women popular in risque novels of the belle époque.4o Other, less domineering analogies were commercial or political: ’Instead of considering the
marriage act an immediately negotiable letter of exchange, the husband should
bring to the first relations a bit more tact and diplomacy. 14’ This kind of figure
of speech, ostensibly for grooms, also appeared in brides’ manuals, where it
may have alerted brides to the fact that they could demand some consideration.
Coded messages were all young brides received, since their manuals did not
mention foreplay other than indirectly, by warning them not to expect
’romance’ in the marital bed. This warning adds a layer of meaning to the
familiar moralistic pronouncements against girls reading romantic novels.
Romantic novels might not only arouse girls’ sexual desire, they might raise a
bride’s expectations about marital sex. Nor did brides’ books explain how to
prepare for intercourse other than relaxing and trusting their husband. Only
one kind of self-help book in French accorded young women a limited agency
in the sexual arena. Beauty guides conveyed how to attract potential husbands
through personal cleanliness, demure clothing, discrete cosmetics, and subtle
flirting. Yet these guides forbade the bride any direct sexual initiative and told
her that she was ’a prisoner of the inevitable’.42
The official approach to girls’ sex education changed little in the half century
under consideration. In the late nineteenth century, Catholic convent schools
still taught many bourgeois girls. They paid attention to the body in the form
of regulating and cleansing it, but sex education ’consisted essentially of
surveillance and silence’. Like the nuns, students had to sleep one to a bed,
with a sister in every dormitory. Many boarding schools insisted on bathing in
a shift well into the twentieth century. Sex was not discussed. Of course,
official repression hardly meant no student talk or exploration. More progressive Catholic schools introduced physical education to develop the
muscular and circulatory systems, which they claimed would counteract the
girls’ sensibility (often associated with their sexuality) and strengthen the body
for healthy pregnancies and babies.43
39
Bourgogne, op. cit., 31-6; Fischer, op.
cit.,
265-7; Reboux,
op.
cit., 37; Surbled,
op. cit.,
IX,
56-7, 75-80.
Mayoux, op. cit., 9 and 170; and Houdré-Boursin, op. cit. Even radicals like Jean Marestan,
L’éducation sexuelle (Paris 1915) referred to ’a precious instrument that ... only fully vibrates in
expert hands’. See Mireille Dottin-Orsini, Cette femme qu’ils disent fatale (Paris 1993), 15, 31,
92ff, on novels.
40
41
42
43
Siredey, op. cit., 29.
Fischer, op. cit., 264; and Vicomtesse Nacla, Il! Le choisir, le garder (Paris 1897), 80.
Odile Arnold, Le corps et l’âme. La vie des religieuses au XIXe siècle (Paris 1984), 81,
39I
In the secular school system, the Ministry of Public Instruction issued
official hygiene programmes in the late 1890s. While these programmes
gradually introduced the study of human anatomy and physiology into
schools, the human reproductive system and functions were conspicuously
absent. When the City of Paris allowed a ’popular feminine hygiene’ textbook
with a chapter on sexual - mainly menstrual - hygiene into school libraries
in 1903, the Ministry sought and obtained its removal. The minority of girls
who went to secular high schools (lycees) learned about vegetable reproduction, albeit without the degree of sexualization that Londa Schiebinger
finds in more advanced biology texts.44
As early as 1900, doctors linked girls’ ignorance about reproduction to the
absence of sex education in schools. Although hygiene programmes were
modified between 1905 and 1940, the only significant additions regarding
sexuality were sections on venereal diseases for adolescent boys and infant
care for adolescent girls.45
By 1910, the Third International Congress on School Hygiene, held in Paris,
considered the subject of preparation for sexual initiation. Favourable French
delegates included the pre-eminent paediatrician Pinard, gynaecologists like
Siredey (author of a guide to women’s diseases that discussed sex), and Dr
Albert Mathieu, President of the French League for School Hygiene. But most
pre-war advocacy assumed maternal responsibility for girls’ sex education.
Even feminists like Augusta Moll-Weiss, who devised a system of educating
girls ’according to their physiology’, did not include reproduction, much less
sex, in her lesson plans.46
After the first world war, more French feminists supported public sex
education. Writing at the end of the war, Avril de Sainte-Croix claimed that
the future of the race depended on sex education. Like early American sex
educators, Avril de Sainte-Croix believed that knowledge of sex should only be
meted out to young people in small quantities. She wanted progressive, public
school instruction offered in the natural sciences, beginning with vegetable and
animal reproduction. She rejected the negative approach of warning against
vice in favour of ’an initiation into the good, healthy life’. 47
195-7; and Mère Marie du Sacré-Coeur, La Formation catholique de la femme contemporaine
,
(2nd edn, Paris 1899), 21-32.
Dr Armand Levy, L’enseignement de l’hygiène individuelle dans les écoles (Paris 1902),
27-33; Dr René Martial and Mme Léontine Doresse, Hygiène feminine populaire (Paris 1923),
V-VI; and Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston
1993).
45 M.R. Paty, ’L’enseignement de l’hygiène à l’école primaire’, Journées médico-scolaires de
l’enfance d’âge scolaire (Paris 1935), 260-4; and A. Pizon, Hygiène
. Nouveaux programmes.
Classe de 3me, garçons et filles (Paris 1927).
46 Bessède, op. cit., 10; Jablonski, L’éducation sexuelle. Conférence faite à la Ligue d’Hygiène
scolaire (Poitiers 1913); and Mme Augusta Moll-Weiss, Les mères de demain. L’éducation de la
jeune fille d’après sa physiologie (Paris 1902).
47 Avril de Sainte-Croix,
L’éducation sexuelle (Paris 1918); and Campbell, op. cit., 10.
44
392
Ministry officials considered sex education in the 1920s, but the concept
remained controversial. When the Faculty of Medicine endorsed a proposal
that sexual hygiene should be a branch of public education at the end of the
decade, the Catholic Congress of Christian Marriage decisively rejected it.
Even though most teachers by the mid-1930s felt that children should be
instructed about ’sexual life’, hardly any offered instruction because of
cultural beliefs that the subject was dirty and private. As late as 1973, when
the Ministry accepted sex information in the curriculum, it provided few
instructional resources. The Planned Parenthood Federation attributed French
procrastination to the conservative Catholic tradition.48
Although most of the French sex advice for girls, like that for American
adolescents, was repetitive, there were modifications in the advice between the
wars. One catalyst was changing scientific theories about sex. In the late
nineteenth century, most French biologists and hygienists accepted evidence
that male and female sexual organs had a common embryological origin
and accordingly, that sex was influenced by environment. Developmental
schemes suggested that pre-pubertal children were not fully sexed beings,
with the corollary that they did not require sex education. In the first quarter
of the twentieth century, the emergence of endocrinology with its claim
that sex hormones were activated at puberty, put more emphasis on sex
education in adolescence. (Since endocrinologists introduced the unsettling
notion of an intersexual phase between essentially feminine childhood and
maturity, which was particularly complicated for boys, they stressed boys’
education for virility.) Freudian ideas about childhood sexuality, which had
some currency in France by the 1930s, brought demands for early childhood
instruction.49
More practically,
new and more effective means of disseminating sex
information developed. The Association for Christian Marriage held conferences and published pedagogical tracts that criticized confessors, nuns and
school mistresses who, ’under the pretext of guarding the purity of the young
girl, awaken in her feelings of disgust and revolt’. Their tracts recommended
incremental maternal and parental sex instruction. When a child asked,
mother should answer honestly, ’without lowering her voice as if it was something improper’, but offer no more information than necessary to satisfy the
child’s curiosity. This meant talk about flora and fauna, pollen and eggs, but
also about Adam, Eve and original sin. At puberty, or as late as 18 for girls,
48
Aulaire,
op.
op. cit., 13-20; International Planned ParentSex Education in European Member Countries
cit., 7, 19; Stéphani-Cherbuliz,
hood Federation, A Survey
on
the Status
of
(London 1975), 6-7, 19, 22-7, 46-7.
Jane Maienschein, ’What Determines Sex? A Study of Convergent Research Approaches,
, 75 (1984), 457ff; G. Maranon, ’Les états intersexuels à la puberté’ in Guy
1880-1916’, Isis
Laroche (ed.), La puberté. Etude clinique et physiopathologique (Paris 1938), 33-48; Nelly
Oudshoorn, ’Endocrinologists and the Conceptualization of Sex, 1920-1940’, Journal of the
History of Biology
, 23, 2 (Summer 1990), 163-86; Léon Eisenstein, Education sexuelle (Etude
et
biologique psychique du problème
) (Lyon 1939), 11-15, 22ff, 50-86.
49
393
mothers should tell daughters about maternity and fathers should tell sons
about paternity.&dquo;
Unlike Avril de Sainte-Croix, the Association had a primarily negative
or preventive purpose. It wanted sex education to dissuade children from
masturbation and persuade them that chastity was ’the only protection against
the plague of venereal diseases’. Their brochures urged wives to refuse their
husbands’ demands to use contraception. A 1938 brochure on maternal
’initiation’ of seven- to twelve-year-old children advised telling these young
children about hours of ’very intense labour pains’.5’ Today, we worry about
the effect such information might have on impressionable children; then, the
author (a mother herself) argued that it would increase respect for mothers.
In the early 1920s, Dr Germaine Montreuil-Straus of the National Council
of French Women joined with the French National League Against the
Venereal Peril to organize all-women meetings for sex education. By 1925, she
had constituted a Feminine Education Committee of the Society of Sanitary
and Moral Protection. Over the next decade, the Committee gained the
support of moderate feminist groups such as the French Union for Women’s
Suffrage and the League for the Rights of Women, and 176 other organizations, including Catholic youth groups. With subsidies from the Ministry of
Health, Welfare and Social Insurance, the Committee sponsored 644 conferences throughout France which attracted 140,000 persons. Twenty-six conferences were held at Normal Schools and others at labour exchanges and
working women’s shelters. The Committee also distributed 83,000 educational brochures, and estimated that one-third of all female public school
teachers (institutrices) had received brochures by 1935.52
By linking girls’ sex education with venereal and maternal protection, Dr
Montreuil-Straus made considerable progress. Gynaecologists recommended
the Feminine Education Committee’s brochures and conferences. The
Association for Christian Marriage even provided a forum for her report on a
survey that showed that young women were not shocked, but rather reassured,
by sex education.53
Criticism of maternal neglect of girls’ sexual instruction abated. As early as
1923, Dr Helina Gaboriau felt that mothers informed by ’natural history’
Abrand, op. cit., 27-34.
Mme Comolet-See, ’Comment redresser les déviations sexuelles?’ in L’église et l’éducation
sexuelle, 76-85; R.P. de Ganay, ’L’éducation de la pureté et les initiations nécessaires’ and Abbé
Viollet, ’Quelques exemples d’entretiens des parents avec leurs enfants’ in R.P. Ganay, Dr H.
Abrand and Abbé J. Viollet, Les initiations nécessaires (26th edn, Paris 1933); M. Admary,
Initiations par une maman (Role de la mère) (Paris 1938), 42ff.
52 Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Fonds Dr Germaine Montreuil-Straus, especially
Dr Aimé Gauthier, ’La femme contre le péril vénérien’, Vers la santé
, 6, 11 (November 1925), and
Dr Germame Montreuil-Straus, L’oeuvre accomplie par le Comité d’Education féminine
. For a good study of Straus’s campaign, see Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization
(1925-1935)
Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago 1994).
53 Platon and Lacroix, op. cit., 57; Mme Montreuil-Straus, ’Note relative à l’éducation sexuelle
des jeunes filles’ in L’église et l’éducation sexuelle (Paris 1929), 142-6; Campbell, op. cit., 43.
50
51
394
would instruct their daughters how to avoid a painful initiation, or, if they
embarrassed, take their daughters to a ’doctor of their own sex’ well
before the wedding. Impressionistic evidence suggests that mothers became
more responsible after the first world war shocked them out of ’complacent
illusions’, and campaigns for sex education influenced them.54 What exactly
these mothers told their daughters is unclear, in so far as girls’ and women’s
memoirs are silent on the subject. However, to the degree that their instruction
was influenced by respectable advice on sexuality, it was no doubt as normative as informative.
were
Mary Lynn
Stewart
is Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser
University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. She is the author of Women,
Work, and the French State: Labor Protection and Social Patriarchy,
1879-1919 (Montreal 1989) and, with Elinor Accampo and Rachel
Fuchs, of Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France,
1870-1914 (Baltimore 1995). She is currently working on a book
provisionally entitled For Your Health and Beauty: Physical Culture
for French Women, 1880-1940.
54
Gaboriau, op. cit.,
93 and 96;
Stéphani-Cherbuliz, op. cit.,
12.