Towards an ethics of sexuality – alternative feminist figurations and a (boy) child: a close reading of a prize-winning sex education manual from the early twentieth century

ABSTRACT

Sex education has been a major concern that has run in parallel with the creation of the modern concept of childhood (innocence) in Western societies. When priests opposed sex education for children, teachers and physicians advocated the need for education. In Sweden, in the early twentieth century, two female physicians wrote a prize-winning manual about sex education. In this paper, I present a close reading of the manual with a focus on how the (boy) child and (mother) woman were presented. The analysis aims to read the manual in three ways pointing to how it communicated resistance to otherings of the female body: (i) one reading focusing on how the female and (boy) male bodies were imagined, (ii) a second reading informed by Freudian theory and, (iii) a third reading guided by contemporary feminist studies which highlight, among other topics, the importance of investing in a representation of femininity defined by women. I will show how the authors gave an alternative interpretation of the mother–child-father relationship compared to Freud, and that they did so by writing their bodies into the text. The analysis shows how a striving towards an ethics of sexuality, including gender equality, have been part of the sex education genre for many years, and can serve as an inspiration today.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex education
• feminist reading
• boyish innocence
• female body
• Freudian theory
• mother-child-father relationship

Introduction

In Sweden, in the early twentieth century, two female physicians wrote a prize-winning manual about sex education, entitled: Handledning i sexuell undervisning och uppfostran [Supervision in sex education and upbringing] (Kinberg and Sundquist 1909).¹ They won the prize in competition with 25 other manuscripts. The competition was launched by the medical monthly journal Hygiea, with one female and two male physicians in the jury. At the time, most manuals were written by male authors (Laskar 2005). The authors, Julia Kinberg and Alma Sundquist, were part of a collective of female Swedish physicians who, in line with an international trend, insisted that sex education based on facts instead of prejudice (for example, myths about the stork delivering babies) was imperative, and that children (and adults) needed sex education in school as well as at home (Allen 1995; Lennerhed 2002; Sauerteig and Davidson 2009). Until now, these female authors, Kinberg and Sundquist, have not constituted the centre of interest in research.

In this paper, I argue that these authors strove to change the future by educating children about gender because gender equality mattered. They were both educated women, from the bourgeoisie, who had gained access to a professional field in a country with a form of state organisation later described as ‘women-friendly’ (Hernes 1987, 135). However, in spite of their education and expertise, they were not enfranchised as citizens. The contemporary debate about women’s rights included debates about female and male sexuality in relation to notions of men’s right to free sex. In particular, men from the bourgeoisie were held responsible for their double standards about sexuality; how they claimed the right to sex in the private home with their spouse, and at the same time a right to fulfil their sexual needs with prostitutes or others in the public domain. In the Nordic context, according to research, this debate took place mainly in the theatre, an important arena for societal debate (Witt-Brattström 2015, 436). My aim is to show how Kinberg and Sundquist, by writing this manual about sex education, created new imaginaries of embodied material-discursive experiences of gender and sexuality which carried the potential to actually change the relationships between men and women in a more equal direction. A basic line of argument was that men ought to respect women’s bodies and sexuality, which would create more equal relationships between men and women. The boy child played an important role in how this argument was presented, as will be shown.

The analysis is guided by an intention to read the manual in three ways: one reading analysing how the female body was presented from an inside and an outside perspective entangling female and male bodies, a second reading informed by Freudian theory (mediated via the field of gender and sexuality studies, Beasley 2005), and the third guided by contemporary feminist studies which highlight, among other topics, the importance of investing in a representation of femininity defined by women (Braidotti 2002, 2011) and by writing the body into the text (Lykke 2010). I will show that Kinberg and Sundquist gave an alternative interpretation of the mother–child-father relationship compared to Freud, and that they did so by writing their bodies into the text. The research problem I address concerns how historical sources in sex education can be used to give new understandings of how sex education was perceived in history – by women – and how the historical may inform todays discourse on sex education.

In today’s discourse the need to inform children about good quality sex education at an early age is highlighted and the reasons for doing this is manifold, including ‘improving mental and physical well-being, as well as individuals’ ability to develop appropriate competence skills, to understand and critically challenge assumptions, to avoid sexual exploitation and abuse and to achieve healthy sexual development’ (Stone, Ingham, and Gibbins 2013, 229).). In addition to such contemporary motives, this present paper highlight the role of sex education in matters of gender equality. Hence, uncovering more examples of women’s ways of creating alternative representations of the feminine and masculine makes history more complex, and can also add experiences relevant to different women and men of varying age in contemporary society. I will start by giving an overview of the manual and clarifying my approach to analysing the text.

Material: the manual and its societal-political context

An overall aim of the manual (Kinberg and Sundquist 1909) was to make it clear that teachers, as well as both parents (mothers and fathers), had a responsibility for children’s sex education. The argument was that for sex education in school to become productive, the child needed education before entering school age. The child needed to have a ‘simple, natural and sound perception about the origin of life’ conveyed in ‘the home’ (143). Teachers’ and parents’ lack of knowledge of the subject was resulting in a one-sided, moralising argument claiming that sex and reproduction are ‘a sin’, with the single message ‘you are not allowed’ (140–141), as formulated in the manual. The text presented a lengthy explanation of why this would lead to negative effects, and why such an argument was not enough when the aim was to influence people’s actions in a more positive way. People’s actions, the manual explained, were guided by both the ‘organisation of the brain’ and the (bodily) experiences and notions affecting each individual in the moment of (any) action (141). In order for people to change their actions, they had to be motivated to want what was best for themselves and society. And to be able to perform such actions – prompted by the brain and bodily actions – more knowledge about the body and the consequences of certain actions was needed.

The manual gave a critique of the way in which only plants’ reproductive organs, and not those of humans or animals, were put on display in other textbooks. Such books were regarded as being of poor quality; they were truncated, since both humans and animals were perceived as ‘genderless’ (Sw. könlösa) (140). It was important, especially for teachers, to be able to teach about ‘all organs in the body, including reproductive organs’ in a ‘natural way’ (142, italics in original). In such a form of sex education it would, the text suggested, be ‘as simple to talk about he and she animals, about male and female reproductive organs, as it is to talk about he and she flowers, stigma and anther’ (142). As this quotation shows, there was an emphasis on human and non-human bodies in the manual, which merged with the idea that more knowledge about the body – as a sexed human, animal and plant body – would change people’s actions. Sex education was the answer to meeting the request for individual motivation, and this is what the manual strove to initiate among parents, teachers and, eventually, children. It was in line with the authors’ ambition to change society to become more women friendly; they were both engaged in the women’s rights movement and in several national and international committees (Nilsson and Sundquist n.d; Nilsson and Andersson n.d).

In a broader societal-political context, the manual’s effects went far beyond the goal of guiding sex education. The year after publication, in 1910, the Swedish feminist magazine Dagny published a positive review of the manual. This fed into an ongoing, heated debate which had been running since the 1880s, about contraceptives, racial hygiene and vice. This was not a local Swedish debate, but a discussion taking place across the Nordic countries, Europe, the UK and the USA. Questions concerning sex education dealt with the issues of whether children should have sex education at all and, if so, where it ought to take place (at home or in children’s institutions) and who should provide the education (parents, teachers, physicians or priests) (Allen 1995; Lennerhed 2002). However, in the local Swedish context, in April 1910, the manual and its reception effected an ongoing debate in parliament about the role of contraceptives. The outcome was a law prohibiting public information and the selling of contraceptives, which was in direct contrast to the authors’ standpoint on this issue.² The manual included information about contraceptives, which arouse public critique, but also pawed way for advocates striving for the right to have sex without procreating children (Laskar 2005; Nilsson and Sundquist n.d; Nilsson and Andersson n.d).

It is also worth noticing that this manual was singled out as important in the political debate, even though three other manuals on the exact same topic and part of the same competition but not receiving first prize, were published in the same year, two written by a woman (|Cederblom 1909a, 1909b), and one by a man (Oker-Blom 1909). Because of its importance in the political debate, the text by Kinberg and Sundquist attracted particular interest and an important position in the public debate. In the manual they had a section about the positive outcomes of racial hygiene, which was also part of the contemporary debate, and a motive for their positive attitudes to contraceptives (cf. Laskar 2005). In time, the manual became part of the broader international context, being translated into English in 1926 and 1927, and into Danish in 1932. Something happened during the process up to translation, however. The Swedish title signalled that sex education was a general and natural part of education and upbringing: Supervision in sexual education and upbringing [Sw. Handledning i sexuell undervisning och uppfostran]. This was changed in the English translation, where the focus was on the body with its organs and its materiality, as part of a medical discourse; the translation read: Sex hygiene: The anatomy, physiology, and hygiene of the sex organs.

Method: three readings of the manual

I first came to this manual due to my interest in how sex education can be analysed in the intersection of childhood studies and gender studies. My interest focused on how notions of a romanticised, innocent childhood, which developed from the eighteenth century onwards, can be understood in relation to notions of children and childhood that emerge from sex education. From a historical perspective, there has been a gradual shift in terms of children and sexuality. The more closely children have been associated with innocence, the more they have been disconnected from sexuality (Robinson 2013). Jackson and Scott (2010) argue that sexuality is a key marker for children and childhood today, excluding children from discourses of sexuality since they are perceived as innocent. A key question, they contend, is therefore what children are supposed to know about sexuality. This triggered my interest in looking at historical material, to see if children were presented differently from their representation in today’s sex education discourse. What were children supposed to know, and how can that be understood in relation to feminism and women’s right to their own bodies and sexuality?

This approach informed my reading of the manual; it became a close reading of how the child (boy) and woman (mother) were presented. What knowledge should be passed on to the boy, why and how? What role should the mother have and how is the relationship between the mother and boy presented? One finding was that uncontrolled, harsh masculinity ought to be civilised through boyish innocence. Boyish (and eventually male) innocence would grow out of boys’ intimate relationships with female bodies, as well as from studies of nature. Nature was perceived as both heterosexual and innocent, as was the boy. In this, the child and nature shared common identities; both were presented as sharing innocence, and eventually reinforcing a sexuality that was heterosexual and innocent. The boy served as a role model for other boys who needed to go through a process of what I refer to as ‘innocence-ing’, including studying nature and celebrating the female body, the most important body in human reproduction, according to the manual (Lindgren 2016).

Now I intend to take this analysis further in a step-by-step reading of a section of the manual. Firstly, I make a reading focusing on how the female and (boy) male bodies were presented as entangled. Secondly this analysis is related to Freudian theory, and I suggest that the authors of the manual present an alternative understanding of the mother and (boy) child relationship to that suggested by Freudian theory. The authors used female adults’ and male children’s bodies in order to pursue this alternative conceptualisation, to create a narrative based on empirical women’s experiences, in line with today’s feminist studies. This is the third reading of the text. In presenting this narrative, the authors suggest an alternative figuration of the male-female nexus to that presented in Freud’s theories, and that relates to today’s discourse in feminist studies. The three readings argue that the manual presented varying ways to resist otherings of the female body.

Analysis: resistance to ‘otherings’ of the female body

The part of the manual analysed in this paper concerns sex education in the home, before the child enters school, and the importance for parents to deliver a ‘modest, natural and sound view on the origin of life’ (Kinberg and Sundquist 1909, 143). This part of the text, covering eleven pages of the total of 152 pages of the manual, started out as a lecture given by Julia Kinberg, who was married with children. Kinberg gave lectures about neurosis and hysteria, and commented on the method of psychoanalysis at the Medical Society, which implies that she was familiar with Freud’s ideas (Nilsson and Andersson n.d). The manual singled out an example in which she as a mother educated her three-year-old son. Thus, she used her own life and body to give a concrete example for readers. In the following analysis, I will show how the narration was built up to create an understanding of female and male bodies as interconnected and entangled. There was a female voice in the text, the mother’s voice, as well as a male (boy) child’s voice and the narration sets these voices in dialogue with each other, although the female voice is dominant. The boy child’s voice was quoted, so as to create a notion of authenticity, and yet the female voice – the narrating voice – mediated the boy’s talk, thoughts and experiences, including young and adult males’ understandings.

In addition, female bodily experiences were mediated via the same female narration, putting the female in a privileged position, including having the right to speak for others. The way in which the different voices were presented, with quotations and where the child and mother had a conversation, might be explained by the fact that the origin of the text was actually a lecture. This strategy can be described as a form of dramatisation, a way to use ordinary people to address a live audience and maintain its interest while creating a sense of immediacy and actuality. When reading the text, one gets the feeling that one is taking part in a live event, rather than ‘merely’ reading a text, and I hope the quotations I use will communicate this feeling of everydayness, reality and authenticity. Similar strategies would later be used when public media – i.e. school radio – educated children in school and ‘used the participation of ordinary people as a way to attract and motivate the audience’ (Lindgren 2012, 242). I will now present my three readings of the manual, starting with an analysis of how the female body was entangled with a male body.

Reading I: inside and outside perspectives of the female body – via a boy child

In presenting my first reading, I have chosen to structure it from what may appear to be two binary positions; firstly, from a perspective inside the female body, followed by one from outside the body. As shown in the analysis, and as outlined above, the narrative in the text was not aiming to inscribe such a dualism. What the narration actually accomplished was to illustrate a notion of bodies’ interconnectedness. Thus, the internal and external perspectives are simply a strategy that I use to make the analysis traceable and presentable, in all its complexity. I will now outline these internal and external perspectives.

The (boy) child inside the female body

The example explaining that parents ought to provide sex education in the home covers several pages and starts with how the author, as mother, gave her son Ernest Haeckel’s book, The history of creation: Or the development of the earth and its inhabitants by the action of natural causes (1876), to read. Unexpectedly, according to the text, this triggered her son to think about reproduction, and he asked her: ‘So, Mum, where do eggs come from?’ She described, using many words, how he had been like an egg in her body, gradually growing from a small dot into a big boy able to punch his mother, from inside her. She elaborated on how her body had been necessary for the boy to grow and prosper, and she included another female adult and an unborn child in her narration:

And while he was now curled up in there under his mother’s heart and felt good and lived on what his mother provided him and did not need to cry for food when he was hungry, and everything ran smoothly on its own, he became so big that his mother also came to look much bigger – look at Aunt Gerda, now she is walking around with a small child inside her, imagine how big it must already have become! Soon it will crawl out. (Kinberg and Sundquist 1909, 145)

As can be seen in this quotation, the intimate tone and the description of the interconnectedness of the female and (boy) child’s bodies was explicit. His growing child body affected her adult body. Yet, she was depicted as the more active partner in the relationship while he was inside her. Her body provided his body with nurture and, hence, in a fundamental way, gave him life. In the narration, she also emphasised the importance for the child to become ‘big’, to grow. The process of growth and development was so forceful that it transformed the adult female bodies; they also grew in the process. As a result, the child body and the adult body grew together, in a mutual process of shared enlargement. When it included the other woman, Aunt Gerda, in the narration, the presentation moved from describing this boy child to potentially any child, regardless of gender. The process of growth was positioned as the key figuration in these descriptions of female bodies in the creation of new life. However, when it was ready to be born, the child’s activity, regardless of gender, was highlighted, as though the human child could ‘crawl out’ from a womb on its own initiative.

This way of portraying the child as both a receiver of female nurturing while inside the female body, and agentive and competent while on its way out of the body, is interesting. The male foetus was portrayed as dependent on the female body to be able to grow and become ‘big’. This is a figuration in which the male-female heterosexuality nexus was reinforced at the same time as the female held a privileged position. The notion created was that there would be no human babies were it not for women. An implied message was that men ought to respect this and place women in the high position to which they were entitled. Taking into account the fact that this text was produced within a context in which psychology had started to show a direct interest in children’s development, the theme of growth could be understood as an indirect comment on the field, in which male psychologists focused on children’s development only, as though detached from the female body. The manual directed the reader’s attention to the interdependence between mother and child and hence the need to include women. Moreover, it emphasised the interdependence between an internal and an external perspective; that these were not dichotomous perspectives but, rather, they hung together.

The female voice narrating this message addressed both a specific child (her son) in an intimate relationship, and, at the same time, an adult audience outside the private family sphere. The author talked to her son and, at the same time, about him. In this sense, it is an open text and the readings could vary depending on the reader. The narration included what has been referred to in research about children’s literature as a dual address (cf. Wall 1991). A dual address refers to a text that unfolds layers of meaning through which adults and children can come to different understandings depending on their individual resources and experiences. It seems as though the manual strove to create multiple ways of understanding the text. In any case, in a context where sex education was the topic, both the dual address and the presentation of an autonomous and competent child with a right to knowledge, might stand out as progressive even when compared with today’s standards (cf. Jackson and Scott 2010; Robinson 2013). Indeed, the manual was written and published several decades before advocates for the Sociology of Childhood started to theorise about the active and competent child (Jenks 1982; Ryan 2008; James and Prout 2015/1990), although they did not do so in contexts of sex education. Even though the boy was connected to nature and innocence (Lindgren et al. 2015), he was also entangled with the female body and made dependent on that body. I will now move from the inside-body perspective of the mother–child embodiment to an outside-body perspective, and show how the same kind of argument was presented after the boy had been born.

The (boy) child outside the female body

Julia Kinberg continued with descriptions of how the boy experienced her body; now from the outside (Kinberg and Sundquist 1909). She emphasised the spatial interconnectedness between the adult female body and the male child’s body; how she and her son ‘share the same room’. One morning, while in bed, the boy suddenly gave his attention to ‘a couple of small red elevations (Sw. upphöjningar) on his mother’s breasts’ (146). This discovery prompted the boy to pose a question to her: ‘What are those dots, mother?’ (146). She explained, again using many words, how the ‘dots’ had fed him with milk when he was very little and without any teeth. In contrast to other milk and food, this particular milk kept him healthy. She elucidated that her breasts became bigger due to the fact that they were filled with milk, and that they grew while he was inside her ‘so it would be ready for you when you felt the urge to crawl out and start to scream for food’ (146). As this shows, her description of their bodies’ interconnectedness and mutual dependence was combined with a description of the boy as active and competent; he was interested in discovering more about her breasts, and he could verbalise his wishes, he could crawl out and he could scream. The boy reacted to her answer both verbally and physically, as she explained in the manual:

He thought about this for a while, and then he said: ‘I want to kiss mother’s kind (Sw. snälla) dots, that have given me milk, for me not to become ill when I was little’ – and then he kisses the dots slowly (Sw. sakta) and gently (Sw. varligt) and it is strange to observe (sw. se) how this rascal (Sw. vildbasare), who in other situations does not think beyond the end of his own nose, gives that kiss with care (Sw. varsamhet), which could be described as devotion (Sw. andakt), when he then, in his own (small) way, maybe thinks about the fact that here he once got his food, and close to these he has grown into a big, strong boy. (Kinberg and Sundquist 1909, 146)

Similar themes about dependence and growth that were brought up from the inside-body perspective were also considered from the outside-body perspective, but with an increased focus on the active (boy) child’s interest in his mother’s body. More specifically, he communicated an interest in female anatomy that was part of reproduction: her breasts. In the narration, the boy rearticulates his mother’s words, thereby confirming that he understood and agreed with her description of how important her body was for him to develop. Moreover, the boy was motivated in a desire to kiss her breasts, as a way to show her respect and gratitude. The narration expands on how he performed his kissing of her breasts, and his ability to be gentle and careful was emphasised. This part of the narration highlighted that the boy was not particularly considerate in other situations. Together with the way in which his growth and strength were presented, as an important aspect of the boy’s way of being, this difference between being attentive and inattentive was a way to illustrate that he shared features connected to maleness. However, in the act of being close to the female body, and verbalising his experiences, he was performing another kind of boyish behaviour (maleness) than the one that was expected. Hence, sex education changed the way in which the boy handled the female body, and this also transformed how the mother could interact with her son, and eventually how the son would be as an adult. At the end of this section of the manual, the expected transformations in how an educated boy would turn into a man who respected women, and particularly women’s bodies, were presented in a vibrant mode, as shown in this quotation:

Men and women! Do you think that a youth, a man, who is taught in such a way during his childhood to see in his mother’s body the origin of his own life, who has taught himself that from her breasts he drank himself to life and health, taught himself that every little girl he plays with has, like himself, lain under a mother’s heart, got warmth from her blood, been borne by her in pain and will herself, like his own mother, carry children in her womb and feed them from her breasts – do you think that such a young man, when he eventually learns to understand that it is given to him, just with one embrace (Sw. famntag), to supply the female body with the force of life, through which from only one cell in her body millions of cells will grow, that will become a new human life – do you think that such a young man, such a man would frivolously (Sw. lättsinnigt) and without responsibility, without respect (Sw. aktning) and without consideration grab women – the mother’s body and thoughtlessly (Sw. tanklöst) play with the child’s most valuable source of health – her breasts? (Kinberg and Sundquist 1909, 147)

In creating this narrative of how an intimate meeting between a boy child and a mother could advance, the authors developed a figuration of how female and male relationships could be done differently. A key feature of this figuration was the boy’s ability to combine intellectual insights with changed behaviour as a man. In doing this, he became an important male role model who was able to change the way he acted when he encountered new knowledge, and this was in line with what the authors wanted to pursue in writing the manual, as described earlier in this paper. The relationship between the boy’s intellectual capacities and how his access to knowledge and reflections in close connection with a female body changed him for the future, was an important part of the figuration of male and female sexuality. The educated boy did not become a man who was controlled by his desires. On the contrary, this boy had the potential to develop into a man who controlled his own sexuality. This is an alternative configuration, which was part of the ongoing debate about women’s citizenship and gender equality, as explained in the introduction to this paper. It was also an alternative way of describing the child–mother relationship compared to Freudian theory, and I will now move on to that discussion.

Reading II: the manual as an alternative to Freud

According to Freudian theory, the new-born male child’s relation to the mother is symbiotic; they are physically and mentally inseparable entities from the child’s point of view (Beasley 2005). Progressively, boys recognise themselves as distinct from the mother. When a boy identifies the difference between his body with a penis, and her body without a penis, he gradually moves away from her (the oedipal period). According to this theory, the boy’s realisation of himself as different from his mother, and the same as his father, is based on biological, bodily experiences in which a sexed gender is the basis for the boy’s (and girl’s) further development into adulthood. The boy rejects his mother to align himself with his father. As the boy separates from his mother, he loses the sensuality and pleasure of connectedness – both physically and mentally. The boy’s differentiation and separation from his mother pushes him towards selfhood and sameness with males. For Freud, gender was equated not only with biology, but also with anatomy (Beasley 2005, 55). Like Freudian theory, the manual also equated gender with biology and anatomy. Both were also generating gender as a set identity where heterosexuality was the norm (Laskar 2005; Lykke 2010). There were also, however, clear-cut differences with Freudian theory regarding how the relationship between mother and child was narrated in the manual. These differences will now be highlighted.

The female physicians gave nature a conspicuous position in the manual’s texts as well as in the illustrations of cells and growing foetuses. In doing so, they presented the relationship between the mother’s body and the male child as intimate and full of desire. The female body, and especially the breasts, were objects of the male child’s desire. However, and this is an important aspect, his own wish to touch and sense the female breasts, to touch them with his lips and kiss them, and name them as ‘breasts’, created an understanding of the male child as conscious and desiring at the same time. Hence, the boy was not only desiring, as in Freudian theory. Moreover, in addition to desiring and consciously naming the parts of the female body that, according to scientific Linnaean classification, define the class Mammalia – animals that give birth to live infants (Schiebinger 1993) and breastfeed them – he was sensitive to how he approached his mother’s breasts, and hence her body, showing respect and tenderness. This presentation of the male child and the mother, written and published for a broad audience with the aim of teaching and popularising sex education, is, I argue, both unexpected and surprising.

In the manual, the male child was described as a boy who was not in a symbiotic relation with his mother. Instead, the boy was conscious of the female body, and he reacted with his senses, his body and his intellect. He was not an ‘unconscious animal self’ (Beasley 2005, 53), as in Freudian theory, but rather his conscious actions and his agency were emphasised. Moreover, this conscious, sensual desire for the female body was not believed to create a man with a split self, which is the essence of the continued social development of becoming a man who is not a woman, according to Freudian theory (Beasley 2005). Rather, the authors claimed a connection between how the conscious boy experienced the female body and how he would experience female bodies as a grown man. Hence, the boy who discovered that he had a penis was connected, by women’s bodies and by a desire to feel and name women’s bodies, to want what women want; to treat women the way they wanted to be treated. In this manual, this meant that women owned their own bodies and, implicitly, had a sexuality of their own. The idea that, if the boy learned to respect how women wanted to be touched, the relationship between men and women would become more equal, was an essential part of the narration in this text.

Reading III: a manual in dialogue with contemporary feminist studies?

Even though the manual presented a binary understanding of male and female sexuality, in the sense that it ought to be based on a heterosexual relationship, it also transgressed binary oppositions that set men and women as different and autonomous from each other. Instead of imaginaries of the male and female as separate and binary categories, the manual produced ‘excess meanings’ (Lykke 2010, 176), by entangling the child with adults, the masculine with the feminine, and by describing the female body as most important for reproduction. According to Nina Lykke, such excess meanings ‘have a subversive impact on the binary scheme’ (2010, 176) and she proposes, in relation to a postmodern method of deconstruction, that configuring new imaginaries is a way to change modes of being. Excess meanings have the potential to transform formations of power (legitimacy and authority) and to be a driving force for change.

I argue that, in the manual, excess meanings were presented, they were there as a representation in culture, at that time (cf. Irigaray 1985, 76, 78). The excess meanings and entanglements produced new imaginaries of both the male and the female; a male who respected the female body and a female with potency to control her own body (and reproduction). The text performed what Donna Haraway refers to as an ‘imagined elsewhere’, meaning that lived reality, a here-and-now, was combined with imagined alternatives (cited in Lykke 2010, 39). Theoretically, the manual created imaginaries about a female adult and a boy in the here-and-now, the boy to become a man, and the woman to become another body in relation to a (changed) man. This imaginary was about both being and becoming and it involved both adult and child (cf. Lee 2005), producing new adulthoods and childhoods to come.

Rosi Braidotti (2002; 2011), writing about sexual difference theory as a way to promote a more equal society, argues that the feminine in Western discourse has been defined not by women and their own experiences but from within a discourse caught in the logic of the Same, the patriarchal order. For change to be accomplished, another feminine needs to be brought into representation, and that is a feminine defined by women as other than non-men (Braidotti 2002, 26; 2011, 93–94, 132). The manual analysed in this paper is, I argue, an example of such an alternative representation of the feminine entangled with the male, and the boy child is the ‘innocent’ and active agent making this new figuration possible. As Braidotti (2011) explains, there is a difference between feminine representations in a dominant discourse and empirical women with their diverse experiences. She highlights the need for feminists to be ‘working through’ representations of the feminine, to deconstruct it in order to ‘re-possess it, to revisit its multi-faceted complexities’ (Braidotti 2002, 41). Such re-possessions have the potential to become discursive transgressions, moving away from forced subordination under the category Woman by problematising it, repeating it, and moving away from it (Braidotti 2002, 25, 28; Braidotti 2011, 93–94, 100, 162). According to Nina Lykke (2010), Braidotti suggests:

that the energy required to realize the discursive transgressions away from being forced into subordination under the category ‘Woman’ comes from the bodily unease that empirical women experience when the category ‘Woman’ is violently imposed on them, denying their diversity and difference and constructing them as Man’s inferior other. (Lykke 2010, 114)

In the manual, the authors are examples of the empirical women described in this quotation, and they imagined new ways to be in their bodies together with, entangled with, men and boys. I interpret this as a way to avoid becoming trapped in the category of woman that was being imposed on these women at the time when the text was written. During their university education, these women had been in situations where they were denied higher grades than the men they were being examined with. The argument made by a male professor was that they must understand that they could not expect to get a higher grade than the men, since they were women, even though it was acknowledged the men ‘knew almost nothing’ (Nilsson and Sundquist n.d). Hence, these women had experienced what it was like to be judged, not on their knowledge and skills, but instead on their gendered bodies. In the manual, the authors did not write about their feelings of injustice. Instead, they referred to their own positive experiences in everyday life, they wrote their bodies into the text, and they displayed intimate relations, in a way similar to that suggested by today’s feminist methodologies (cf. Lykke 2010). Moreover, they did so without being caught in the logic of the Same, or of neutrality. Instead of describing the feminine as non-male, they created new imaginaries energised by their bodily experiences that pointed towards future ‘alternative feminist figurations’ (Lykke 2010, 114). In doing so, they stressed the importance of the interdependence between difference and equality, held out as a productive feminist strategy in today’s society (Braidotti 2011, 121). The key question evolving at this stage of this paper is: how we can make use of these alternative feminist figurations formulated more than a hundred years ago?

Epilogue and conclusions

The manual analysed in this paper, formulated more than one hundred years ago, is an example of an attempt to create what we today identify as a feminist ambition to construct a utopian, gender-equal sexuality. I have shown how this was done with incentives grounded in the private, intimate sphere of adult–child relations, rather than using motivations centred on women’s rights in the political domain, or among mainly male authors and debaters. The style of the manual was personal and engaged, and in this sense also ‘feminist’, according to today’s understandings of the concept. Moreover, the child’s perceived interest in sexuality could in one way be understood as part of an ongoing pedagogisation of children’s sexuality (Foucault 1978, 104). Another understanding could be that there was no denial of children’s sexuality in relation to norms constituting the good/bad child separate from adults. The bourgeois, white, heterosexual (boy) child was not, as expected by child research, part of a contemporary reconfiguration of the child–adult relationship as separate (Cunningham 1991; Robinson 2013). Instead, the authors described an intimate adult–child relationship within which the child’s actions were used to also educate and inform adults.

By performing the analysis of the manual from 1909, I want to argue that the authors of the manual are entangled with contemporary feminist studies scholars. In addition, the analysis highlights continuities rather than discontinuities between historical time and the here-and-now, between modernist and postmodernist perspectives. I have suggested different interpretations of the manual, arguing that it is an example of: how women can narrate their bodily experiences and create new imaginaries of how men and women can live together, how new interconnections and alliances were proposed (between mother/adult–boy/child–father/adult), how women have tried to resist dominant, white, male science and culture, as well as how these women’s belief in deliberate, progressive education as a way to change society were part of a public discourse.

Although the manual transgresses gender binaries, it maintains an idea of difference: not as a negative, as in difference from something, but difference as a positive, and in particular it gives the feminine, female experience a privileged position. The manual does not imagine the woman as a gender-neutral subject, instead the authors inscribe a female subject, and hence a position to speak from that is not neutral (cf. Braidotti 2011). ‘History is everyone else’s and hence also women’s destiny’, Rosi Braidotti argues (2002, 41), and because of that we need to revisit history to realise how complex and multi-faceted it has been. As my analysis of a manual on sex education authored by two female physicians some one hundred years ago shows, this seems like a productive call. By taking more texts written by women into consideration, we can uncover that alternative figurations not only belong to the future but have also been part of the past. Julia Kinberg and Alma Sundquist could not know, although they perhaps hoped, that the energy they invested to create change can also provoke feminist energy today. Their ambition to educate small children was ahead of time as were their way to use sex education for gender equality. In time, Julia Kinberg, now remarried and hence named von Sneidern, published Sexuell etik (1931) [Sexual ethics].

As this paper shows, it is not sufficient to call for imaginaries that ‘could be’ figured otherwise. The question is also how we make use today of versions of the feminine that ‘have been’ imagined otherwise. Uncovering more examples of women’s ways of creating alternative representations of the feminine and masculine makes history more complex, and can also add experiences relevant to different women, children (and men). In this paper, the past’s future and futures past have been brought into dialogue to produce new alternative figurations to come but also, and equally importantly, to imagine history differently. It shows how a striving towards an ethics of sexuality have been part of the sex education genre for many years – and will probably be for many years to come.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Anne-Li Lindgren, Ph.D., is Professor of Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden, where she is deputy head of the department. She is also a member of the scientific committee at the Agency for Swedish Cultural Policy Analysis. Her current research focuses on childhood visualizations and child cultures in early childhood education from historical and contemporary perspectives.

ORCID

Anne-Li Lindgren http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0499-1345

Notes

1 In 1926 and 1927 the manual was published in English with the topic Sex hygiene: The anatomy, physiology, and hygiene of the sex organs (Kinberg and Sundquist 1926, 1927). As this indicates, the original Swedish version did not, in the topic, relate to the medical discourse on sex education that was prevalent at this time. However, in the English translation, some 16 years later, the relation to a medical discourse was highlighted in the topic. Why this shift came about is outside the scope of this paper.

2 This law was abolished in 1938.