The Sexual Child and the Social Purity Movement

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, Richard Arthur penned several pamphlets warning Australians about the dangers of sexual vice. In his work as a social reformer and later as the Minister of Health, Arthur forwarded the cause of social purity by illustrating the risk and consequence of venereal disease and sexual intemperance in the lives of small children. In his lectures to parents and youth, Arthur (1896) cautioned that childhood innocence, if not protected and reinforced by an education in purity, was vulnerable to those “who impart the knowledge [of sex] in a prurient and objectionable manner” (7). Examining Arthur’s text offers a window onto the often vague and ambivalent nature of the sexual child not only in his work, but also within social purity narratives more generally. As we will illustrate, the epistemological assumptions of the child and its sexuality within the purity movement were markedly different from the medical treatises on masturbation phobia written during the same epoch.

The majority of girls are brought up in entire ignorance of all matters connected with sex. It is the parent’s boast that they are perfectly “innocent,” by which is meant that they know none of the facts of the genesis of life, and are totally unwarned against the dangers which may assail them at any moment. Nothing could be better fitted for the purpose of the seducer, and the innocence which is supposed to throw a halo of purity round the girl is sometimes the instrument of her ruin.

Richard Arthur (1896)