News

Talking about 'the facts of life'

(11 May 2005)

The international conference, entitled ‘Sex Education of the Young in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural History’ organised by Dr Lutz Sauerteig of the Centre for History of Medicine and Disease, was highly successful.

Held recently at Collingwood College, the conference attracted participants from a wide range of disciplines within the humanities and social and public health sciences, including education, law, media studies, and social history as well as practitioners within the field of sex education.

The programme was designed to explore not only the social politics surrounding the provision and regulation of sex education in Europe and North America, but also the wide range of textual and illustrative material employed.

In addition, the conference investigated the experience of sex education from the viewpoint of children and young people- what they know about sexuality, the formal and informal sources of their knowledge, and how they perceived the process of imparting sexual knowledge.

Papers ranged from sexual enlightenment in Soviet Russia to the role of legal narratives in recent sex education in England and Wales; from evidence of student attitudes to sex education in the mid-twentieth century USA to the framing of discourse of sex in British public health films.

Dr Lutz Sauerteig is Wellcome Lecturer in the History of medicine and the conference stemmed directly from his current research project on ‘The History of Sex Education in 20th Century Germany and England’. The conference papers will form the basis of a forthcoming book to be co-edited with Professor Roger Davidson of the University of Edinburgh.

For more information contact:t.p.fennelly@durham.ac.uk