Something mysterious: Sex education, Victorian morality, and Durkheim's comparative sociology
✍ Scribed by Jean Elisabeth Pedersen
- Book ID
- 101300045
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 124 KB
- Volume
- 34
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In 1911, Emile Durkheim participated in a heated conversation about the merits of sex education for French teenagers at the Socie ´te ´franc ¸aise de philosophie. When Jacques-Ame ´de ´e Dole ´ris, the future president of the Acade ´mie de me ´decine, called for a rational sex education in which religious prejudices were dispelled by the light of science, Durkheim responded that anxiety over sex existed in every culture and, therefore, must be a real and not an imaginary issue. When Dole ´ris accused Durkheim of succumbing to the prejudices of his personal background, Durkheim responded by arguing that his beliefs were based on his own sociological research and his understanding of other people's ethnographic facts. In the ensuing debate, he made connections between his interest in the sexual education of French teenagers, his theories of moral education, his defense of secular sociology, and his research into Australian tribal life. Durkheim's major biographer, Steven Lukes, has characterized Durkheim's position on sexuality as "[an] alliance of sociological acumen with strict Victorian morality." 2 This suggests that the Victorian period had only one morality, and that Durkheim was partially blinded by it. However, Victoria, the queen of another nation in any case, had already been dead for ten years when Durkheim expressed his opinions on sex education. Recent historians have argued over whether early twentieth-century France, the setting for Durkheim's debate with Dole ´ris, should be seen as the belle e ´poque, the last period of peace and prosperity before the ravages of World War I, or whether it should be remembered as the fin-de-sie `cle, a period of acute cultural anxiety often expressed in sexualized terms. The mere fact that Durkheim expressed his opinions on sex education in the context of a debate on the subject indicates that his beliefs were more than simply a passive reflection of some static world around him. To understand his position on sex education more fully, one needs to explore the meaning of his actions in a more complicated historical context than the simple adjective "Victorian" suggests.
Previous studies of the historical context in which Durkheim and his associates at the Anne ´e sociologique developed their "French school of sociology" have already shown a variety of ways in which their work was, in the words of Lewis Coser, "shaped by the specific political and academic milieu of the prewar years." 4 For example, historians of the social sciences and of education have explored the common political and intellectual ground of republican politicians seeking a secular morality and emerging sociologists claiming to provide one. 5 Sociologists, historians, and philosophers have focused on the connections and conflicts between the philosophy in which Durkheim and many of his colleagues received