Policing Gender, Class And Family In Britain, 1800-1945 by Linda Mahood

Author:Linda Mahood [Mahood, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781135369262
Google: MPiNAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2005-08-12T04:40:02+00:00

The management of sexuality

In 1859 an Edinburgh physician wrote: “Oh, that some magic power were given to the moneyed and respectable classes, so they might have but one brief comprehensible glimpse of all the frightful orgies that are transacted, night after night, in the squalid lairs of the sunken and depraved.”4 This passage illustrates the concern for the “moral state of the nation” which was a dominant social issue from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Mariana Valverde argues that, in discourses of national degeneration, the fragile nation was seen as subject to the organic process of decay that could “only be halted if individuals, the cells of the body politic, [took] control over their innermost essence or self”. Sexual desire itself was perceived as a “dangerous force, a threat to civilization…which most needed taming”.5 According to Michel Foucault, concern about children’s sexuality was constructed as part of the problem. Since the eighteenth century it had been recognized that “children indulge or are prone to indulge in sexual activity” and this was both “natural” and “contrary to nature” because of the “physical and moral, individual and collective dangers” it posed. The solution was the “pedagogization of children’s sex”. The wide concern about children’s sexuality is evidenced by the proliferation of a body of literature published on the subject throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Parents, educators, doctors and eventually psychologists “would have to take charge…of this precious and perilous, dangerous and endangered sexual potential”6 and channel it in socially useful directions. The Victorian rhetoric of national decline that was deployed to generate support for the child-saving institutions drew widely on images of the “excessive sexuality” of the lower-class children. The specific sexual activities targeted for control in reformatory and industrial schools were, for boys, masturbation lest it lead to homosexuality and, for girls, precocious sexuality lest it lead to prostitution.

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