Hampshire, James and Lewis, Jane (2004) "The ravages of permissiveness": sex education and the permissive society. Twentieth Century British History, 15 (3). pp. 290-312. ISSN 0955-2359
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
In this article we explore how sex education in schools has become an adversarial political issue. Although sex education has never been a wholly uncontroversial subject, we show that for two decades after the Second World War there was a broad consensus among policy-makers that it offered a solution to public health and social problems, especially venereal disease. From the late 1960s, this consensus came under attack. As part of a wider effort to reverse the changes associated with the ‘permissive’ society and legislation of the late 1960s, moral traditionalists and pro-family campaigners sought to problematize sex education. They depicted it as morally corrupting and redefined it as a problem rather than a public health solution. Henceforth, the politics of sex education became increasingly polarized and adversarial. We conclude that the fractious debates about sex education in the 1980s and 1990s are a legacy of this reaction against the permissive society.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | http://tcbh.oxfordjournals.org/ |
| Additional Information: | © 2004 Oxford University Press |
| Divisions: | Social Policy |
| Subjects: | D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Sep 2008 08:29 |
| Last Modified: | 21 Apr 2024 01:24 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/17269 |
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