ABSTRACT
The period inherited the nineteenth-century domestic and familial ideologies that had been refined across classes by the beginning of the twentieth century, and these remained the frameworks within which sexuality was organised. The process of the psychologising of delinquency and crime offered both the formal and informal agents of sexual regulation a potent new means of social control, promising a more refined method of regulation than the blunderbuss of the law. Marriage was now more than ever seen as the legitimate entrance to adult sexual life and social acceptability. Like the marriage manuals for adults, the impulse behind the recognition of the need for a more sophisticated sex education for children was the desire to harness sexuality to the cause of morality. The law eased the difficulties of divorce, but scarcely encouraged termination of marriage; formidable barriers remained, particularly as divorce continued to depend on the concept of a 'Matrimonial offence'.
