Abstract:
Sex education is ideological. It constructs and reinforces ideas about sexual knowledge, bodies, health, identity and morality in response to the social and cultural climate. This study of sex education discourse in New Zealand from 1939 to 1985 demonstrates that sex education in the recent past was not a narrow or predetermined set of information, was not fixated on disease, and was not necessarily aimed at children and delivered in schools. Sex education variously targeted children,
adolescents, married couples and parents with messages about physical, but also moral and emotional, behaviour and development. The thesis examines who provided sex education and the channels they used to do so, and how these changed over time as societal attitudes and preoccupations shifted. Sex educators were not driven by a simple desire to provide enlightenment, but instead presented carefully constructed sets of information designed to reinforce particular (often conservative) messages about love, family, and marital happiness. For the most part, sex education in the second half of the twentieth century reinforced an alignment between heterosexuality, pre-marital chastity, and social success. The debates and arguments for and against sex education delivery reveal both anxieties and hopes, but share an over-riding conviction in its power to affect attitudes and behaviour. This thesis places New Zealand in a developing international scholarship on the history of sex education,
where there are few such national histories. It is the first comprehensive history of twentieth-century New Zealand sex education.
