ABSTRACT
Sexual knowledge is fundamental to the formation of the self; it tells us who we are, man or woman, and what that means in a given culture. The curiosity that drives a child to enquire about the mysteries and secrets of the body, love and reproduction is one of the elements of the self, and the basis of all subsequent curiosities. The questions 'where do I come from?' and 'what is the difference between the sexes?' are among the first and most insistent that all children ask, Freud noticed; two of the starting-points of philosophical enquiry. 1 Autobiographies and life-stories often confirm the urgency behind the pursuit of such knowledge. Understanding how we came by sexual knowledge will tell us something of how the mind works (one proper object of cultural history as Ludmilla Jordanova has pointed out) and how all knowledge is constituted and internalised. 2 Secondly, the ways in which sexual knowledge is transmitted from one generation to another and where responsibility resides in a culture for the skills and practices required for the reproduction of both people and those skills are vexed questions of ethical debate. Sex and ethics are inseparable in public life and private speech. In the 1920s and 1930s, what could and should be said about sex and sexual relations was tried and tested in law, in modernist writings, in the cinema, in the politics of welfare and in conversation. At the same time fertility was declining. Women were choosing to have fewer children than ever before.
