Sex, Purity, and the New Education Movement

A note on the diffusion of medico-moral ideas

Paper presented at the XXVI Annual meeting of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education in Geneva, July 15th, 2004

Lady-activists visiting London prostitutes, ca. 1880

drs. Alderik Visser
University of Berne
Institute for Pedagogy and School-pedagogy
Department of General Education
Muesmattstrasse 27
3012 BERNE – SWITZERLAND
visser@sis.unibe.cH

In September 1877, the first international congress of the ‘Féderation abolitionniste brittannique, continentale et générale’ was held in this very town of Geneva. Some five hundred doctors, preachers, politicians and mostly Christian inspired upper-class feminists from all over Europe met to discuss a serious, but rather ‘difficult’ theme. Slavery and slave trade, of course, by that time had been officially banished almost everywhere, but still, these abolitionists argued, the slavery of women as the objects of male lust, both symbolized by and materialised in prostitution, lingered on with taciturn, sometimes even outspoken consent of medical and political authorities. Their attempts at getting prostitution under medical and legal control implied not only a concession to the ‘oldest trade’ as such, but also to the double standard in sexual morality, so degrading for both women and men. Moreover, medical hygiene had thus far blatantly failed at damming vice and venereal diseases. To fight the proliferation of everything vile and dirty, the members of this ‘Victorian International’ were confident, only moral hygiene would suffice, rational self-control, sexual constraint and temperance at indulging in other sorts of bodily pleasure.

I

About the history of this kind of abolitionism and some related social movements, an abundant amount of literature has been produced. With few exceptions, however, most work on the theme done by social historians, historians of medicine, sexuality and pedagogy as well as by some historical sociologists has thus far been confined to descriptions and analyses within a regional or national framework. There is much to say in favour of such a micro-history of movements, socio-cultural and economic changes within the industrialising world having taken place anything but synchronically. Still, the ubiquity and relative concurrency of these so-called sexual purity movements worldwide is as striking as their resemblance in terms of social composition, religious background and intellectual development. Actually, middle class activism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was and actively sought to be ‘globalized’, building up an intricate collection of international circles and networks of educated women and men, held together by congresses, speeches, magazines, translated materials, international correspondence, friendships and love. The analysis of such networks, their structures and their functioning in dissipating knowledge and beliefs is interesting in its own right, adding considerably to the comparative studies of social movements, as well as to the history of ideas. My major aim today will be to show that this strategy is very promising as well for the historiography of education.

Over the past few decades, educational historians have repeatedly stressed the importance of a break-through of the still predominantly national perspective on pedagogical change and exchange. Moral activism as an international phenomenon, I am convinced, presents itself as a realm, the study of which may contribute considerably to this widening up of the pedagogical horizon. For, to be sure, it has been exactly among those organisations, groups and circles, devoted to changing moral codes, that New Education ideas have been forged, fruitfully discussed and eventually applied. To substantiate this cheeky thesis, I will focus on a tiny fragment of the history of sex education in Switzerland between 1891 and 1910. In doing so, I also hope to show the fecundity of mapping international networks, tracking some notions of ‘hygiene’ and ‘purity’ that have entered into and have subsequently been transmitted by New Education discourse.

Dutch Society for fighting venereal diseases, ca. 1893:
EDUCATION FAMILIY LIFE	SELF-CONSTRAINT FAMILY POWER! Youth organisations Fighting prostitution FAST and FULL medical care Social Help Fighting Quacks	QUA- RAN- TAI- NE	INFORMATION HEALING

II

Sexuality increasingly being banned from the public sphere, at least in bourgeois circles, sex-education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became a pedagogical theme of eminent importance. Having read the famous treatise of his fellow-citoyen Tissot against onanism, Rousseau prayed for Emile not to become aware of his reproductional functions, telling him about all that was necessary and everything that was scorned by nature as late as possible. Interpreted mainly as anti-masturbation education, the German Philanthropes, however, explicitly took up sex to become a part of the curriculum as well as of the architecture of their educational institutions. The famous ‘pedagogical party’ in Dessau in May 1776, where teacher Wolke had an international public be taught sexual biology by two serious schoolchildren, can be interpreted as both the summit and the beginning of the end of enlightenment pedagogy mingling with the ‘difficult’ topic of teaching sex.
For whatever Foucault may have theorised, nineteenth-century contemporaries did actually suffer from what has been coined the Victorian ‘conspiracy of silence’, human sexuality almost constantly being referred to, but only seldom discussed. Manuals about good conduct for both men and women sometimes did refer to the ‘unspeakable’ topic. However, the priests in black and white that had produced these manuals as well as the innumerate quacks could mediate young adults nothing but halfway medical, halfway theological allusions to the power of their bodily fluids, adding to an atmosphere of vagueness and fear. Until approximately 1890, frank discussions about sexuality and human reproduction could only be found amongst scientists, as well as on the very radical fringe of society, i.e., amongst left-Liberals and Freethinkers, utopian Socialist and radical Feminists.

III

In April 1891, however, Marie Heim-Vögtlin, the first European woman doctor, surprised her friends of the Zürich Women’s Society for Uplifting Morality with an address called ‘Some Educational Suggestions for Mothers’. In this speech, Marie Heim decisively argued that it was a prudent mothers’ duty to inform both her sons and her daughters about sexuality and the terrible dangers involved. Arguably the first address delivered on the subject of sex education in Switzerland in more than a century, Marie Heim’s advice marks a rather hesitating break-through of the ‘conspiracy of silence.’ For sure, this Swiss gynaecologist doctor did not exceed the discursive boundaries set by the moral hygiene-movement, of which she was a typical, although not a very pious representative. Her message thus principally was a negative one: Mothers had to make their sons aware of the dangers of masturbation, prostitution and venereal diseases before ‘bad’ friends or a ‘vicious’ servant did so, for such a “pedagogically false enlightenment” (…) “will show to be the first step a boy can take on that fatal ladder, of which the highest stage is ruin.” Although ‘Nature has bestowed girls with the precious gift of being sexually less excitable” which clearly "diminished moral dangers", for them, too, “[the] harsh truth as a protection and a shield” was thought better than “the phantom of innocence, which may lead to a broken life in an unhappy marriage.”

Marie Heim (1845 -1916) 1874 the first European female general practitioner

Marie Heim was well aware of the fact how difficult it was for parents “to open the eyes of their still innocent children for such awful things”, but still, she considered telling them about sex right in time to be “one of their most holy duties,” mothers simply had to fulfil. To explain the fine ladies of the Zürich upper-class how they could tackle this sensitive problem, Heim lacked either the nerves or the words, presumably both. The only practical advice she could give by 1891, was to keep sons away from the pub and to send children to sexually mixed schools at least until adolescence set in. Rather than expanding the discourse, as Foucault has argued, nineteenth-century bourgeois culture had apparently cut back the language in which sex could be discussed.

IV

At the turn of the century, turbulent discussions on the subject of sex education among activists, pedagogues and other preachers evolved, not only in Switzerland, but also in Australia, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the U.S.A. as well as in some other countries. National peculiarities notwithstanding, the educated protestant elites and the French freethinkers around 1900 reached a minimal consensus, holding that a hygienic instruction on the topic of sex was indeed necessary. A fierce debate, then, was fought over the question, who should give what kind of sexual instruction to which children at what age.
As always, Swiss discourses hardly surpassed the language barrier. On both sides of the Röstigraben, however, the influence of the neo-catholic pedagogue Fr. W. Foerster was strongly felt. Considering explicit sex education to be more an expression of the problem than a solution to it, the former Freethinker kept hammering on general moral education to be the only means of reinforcing ‘character’ and ‘will strength’. Among Catholics, this kind of moral education could end up –at least theoretically- in excluding every allusion to bodily functions by means of a mere total control over the thoughts and movements of children. German speaking Protestants in general agreed with Foerster on the value of strengthening moral force, but thought that a prudent and face-to-face explanation of the bodily functions by the children’s parents – preferably the mother – might very well add to this.
Moral purity activists in the French speaking part of Switzerland, headed by the Christian feminist Emma Pieczynska, fundamentally subscribed to this point of view, but eventually went as far as to state that “éducateurs sont qualifiés pour [] élucider [] la vie sexuelle tout entière, dans l’evolutions du genre humain.” As early as 1910, medical doctors with a high moral standing were sent into some French-speaking gymnasia and teacher’s colleges to give instructions on sexual hygiene in separated classes.

V

Although this short-lived experiment seems to have been rather unique, at least in Europe, the very same discussions enfolded everywhere in the Western world along very much the same lines. The extent to which thoughts and concepts on this subject were exchanged internationally can be deduced by the almost simultaneous appearance of sex-education manuals for children and adolescents. In Switzerland, the first such help for prudent parents was a booklet, written in 1872 by the American physician and temperance activist Mary Wood-Allen. Translated into at least eight other languages, this brochure –both evangelical and Darwinist - has been the first in its genre in many countries at pretty much the same time.
The strong international networks of both the women’s movement and the broad coalition of abolitionist groups, showed very effective in disseminating such ideas and materials. In 1900, Albert Heim, a famous Swiss geologist and, indeed, Marie’s spouse, put theory into practice by giving the male students of Zürich a lecture on sexuality from both a Darwinist and a moral hygienist point of view. The lecture is said to have been attended by some eight hundred students, some of whom subsequently organised and distributed more than five editions of a print copy among adolescents and the abstinent youth. Simultaneously, Italian, French and even Dutch translations of Heim’s speech were produced and distributed widely in Europe.
Within a network of cooperating groups and movements, all somehow striving at some ‘higher’ moral or sexual ideal, interesting coalitions could be forged. Dutch Christian-inspired anarchists, organised in the so-called “Pure Life-Movement’ translated books, written by the Swiss-based pedagogue Foerster, who surely was anything but an anarchist; conversely, a pious Reverend from Basle translated a pamphlet on sexual hygiene and the ‘hygiene of thoughts’ into German, written by one of these very anarchists.

The fact that life reformers such as these bearded followers of Tolstoi actively participated in the discourse about sex education is not really surprising. In fact, both Emma Pieczynska and Albert Heim by 1900 seem to have taken an interest in Tolstoi and his views on a radical ‘purification’ of individual and social life. Identifying moral hygiene or sexual purity movements with evangelicalism, a lot of historians have overlooked or underscored the contributions to the debate over ‘the sexual question’ made by liberal and radical feminists as well as socialists of the various kinds. Moreover, it can be discerned that, towards the close of the century, the organised outcry for middle-class decency, originally strongly in favour of ‘old’ liberalism and temperance, mingled with such typical fin-de-siècle strivings such as total abstinence, clothing reform, anti-vivisection, vegetarianism and a gaudy collection of religious substitutes.

Albert Heim Zürich 1847 - 1937 Professor in Geography at the ETH

http://www.iisg.nl/collections/ vegetariersbond/eng/enfance.html (14.07.2004)

'(Opinion des enfants:) Je suis bien content d'être végétarien, car cela me fait de la peine de voir mener à l'abattoir des animaux [...] J'espère bien rester toujours végétarien pour acquérir autant de force que je pourrai afin de mourir le plus vieux possible.' ['(Children's views:) I love being a vegetarian, as I feel bad when I see animals being led to the slaughterhouse... I hope to remain a vegetarian forever to become very strong and to live to be very old'] Ioteyko, J.: L'enfance végétarienne: enquête sur 170 enfants végétariens. Bruxelles : Misch et Thron, 1911, p. 85.

An abundant literature on the interconnectedness of this kind of life-reform, youth movements and the New Education exists, often emphasising the ‘progressive’, yes, ‘revolutionary’ and ‘liberating’ character of the theories and practices involved. Yet, at least what the very strong notions of ‘purity’ and ‘hygiene’ is concerned, moral or otherwise, I’m inclined to argue that in this particular context, rather repressive notions, originating in the mid-nineteenth century, have been translated and transported into the twentieth century. The very founders of the Institute J.J. Rousseau, for instance, either actively participated in, or lived in circles close enough to the French-speaking community of Swiss abolitionists, to be highly influenced by their type of feminism. Writing extensively on the Boarding School Movement, Adolphe Ferrière did consider ‘hygiene’ to be one of the main aims of the écoles nouvelles. Arguing for sex education and mixed instruction, he showed to lean heavily on the arguments as well as on the practical propositions put forward by Emma Pieczynska and other Swiss representatives of moral purity. For reasons of prudishness, some years later he even went as far as to adapt Freudian theory in such a way, that it could serve the cause of a morally pure pedagogy.
It is safe to say, then, that sex education discourse, as it developed in Europe during the fin de siècle, was and actually wanted to be part of New Education discourse. Reversely, the ‘New Human’, progressive pedagogues aimed at bringing about, was in fact the type of a-sexual self-constrained and healthy man, moral purity activists had been propagating ever since the 1870’s. It need not wonder, then, that the specific form in which sexual instruction actually was to be conceived of, did betray more than a mere idiomatic closeness to New Education thinking.

'... and such a stork does not possess the size or strength to carry a small child, does it?' Selmer, Ågot Gjems Een bloemen sprookje : over het ontstaan van het leven [A floral fairytale about the beginning of life], Almelo : Hilarius, 1907, p. 39: Norwegian original ca. 1905

http://www.iisg.nl/collections/vegetariersbond/eng/sprookje.html (14.07.2004)

VI

Speaking again to her women friends in Zürich, Marie Heim in 1904 shows to have had far less difficulties at finding words to tell them what was really at stake in teaching sex. Activist overtones, exaggerating the dangers of débauche in the moral swamp of the modern city, of course still dominated much of her 1904 address. Thirteen years after her first exposition on the topic, Marie Heim had changed her views, however, on the intrinsic ‘ugliness’ of human sexuality, stressing the ‘natural’ character of reproductive intercourse. And, most likely with the help of Emma Pieczynska, she was able present her listeners a truly pedagogical concept of how to tell children and youth where they came from.
Sex education, Marie Heim argued, started with the moral rectitude of the parents, both as role-models and as the primary cause of inherited behavioural traits. A rather Spartan physical education, including sports, manual work, sleeping on hard mattresses with open windows, eating less meat, being sparse with spices and totally abstaining from alcohol, was thought fundamental too, for a sound sexual morality to develop.
A fundamental being laid, the next step, then, was to create “the most effective means of wielding the child: the trust in his mother.” In order to do so, Heim thought it fundamental that women should “take time to live with their children” and create “an atmosphere of love, peace and candour.” Indeed, to educate children both morally and sexually, it was essential to become their “friends”. Then “the more close [the mother] has lived with the child, the more easy she will find the tone of voice to induct it objectively but still tenderly and delicately in a still unknown sphere of life.”
This initiation into the unknown – the actual sex education - would have to take place at three different stages. The young child asking the naive question where he or she came from should, of course, not be deluded with stories about storks, cauliflowers and so on. The little child had a right to get the short and sufficient answer that his mother had borne him or her under her heart. Some years later, still innocent schoolchild was to be brought almost automatically to reach a ‘natural’ understanding of the principle of fertility. A series of talks about the natural world surrounding the child (!), beginning with plants and seeds and ending up with mammals, would do to lead them in infer, what it could be like with humans.
Reaching adolescence, these talks about ‘pure’ nature had to be followed by an explicit and scientific sex-education, making youngsters apt to stand up against inner urges and the evils of the adult world. Such a sound, threefold sex-education, Marie Heim stressed, would imprint their innocent souls “[the] holy thoughts that are the essence of conception and motherhood […], ousting the idea of sensuality which normally is associated with sexual intercourse.”
Fighting sexual immorality and the oppression of women ever since the 1870’s, the moral purity movement had been forced to speak out loud about the very same thing, she wanted society to be less preoccupied with. Anything but truly solving this paradox, Marie Heim by 1907 showed to have found not only the words, but also the pedagogical means of bridging the unbridgeable: A ‘good’ vision of ‘natural’ i.e. only reproductive sexuality to be taught ‘naturally’ to ‘natural’ children in order to keep them ‘naturally’ chaste. Not surprisingly, it was exactly this inhibitive, naturalist and rather Rousseau-like conception of a progressive story of birds and bees, designed to follow the child’s psychological development, that came to be the standard in American and European sex education-manuals for over more than half a century.

VII
Hygiene –stemming from the Greek hugia, meaning ‘soundness’- was and is first of all a medical concept. Using it as a model and as a battle-cry, a coalition of medics and urban engineers impressively demonstrated nineteenth century man the progressive force of natural science. By virtue of its success at reducing diseases and death-rates, ‘hygiene’ became a very impressive subjective, the use of which over the years showed a considerable plasticity. The abolitionists, fighting those doctors who thought it practically impossible or indeed unhealthy for men to refrain from sexual activity, coined the term ‘moral hygiene’ as a model for men and women who were strong enough to abstain self-consciously from carnal pleasures. Claiming and eventually getting medical support, these moral hygienists thus managed to present themselves as being on the side of science and progress as well.
Towards the end of the century, other activists did copy this discursive strategy, and invented terms like social hygiene, sexual hygiene, hygiene of thoughts and the hygiene of the brain, and, not to forget, racial hygiene. By means of these co-opting strategies, the concept of hygiene came to include more and more medical as well as moral content. Here, the history of late-nineteenth and early twentieth century efforts that concentrated around ‘school-hygiene’, show to be very instructive, which I will again exemplify by development in Switzerland.
Starting off in 1870’s, the Swiss movement for school-hygiene or -healthcare was a full-fledged hygienist project, in which doctors and educational politicians cooperated to modernise, i.e. to rationalise the physical part of the expanding public school system. After 1900, the themes that the Swiss activists for school-hygiene had traditionally discussed, such as gymnastics, school architecture, school-furniture, school-doctors, school-dentists, etc., were added to, and partly even got replaced by typical New Education topics such as school gardens, boarding schools and forest schools, manual education and, indeed, sex education. New Education pedagogues pledging contacts with moral and other hygienists, those advancing school hygiene reversely took over much of took over much of the New Education programme as a means of promoting pupils’ health.

http://www.iisg.nl/collections/vegetariersbond/eng/schoonheid.html (14.07.2004)

“...the body a healthy dwelling for the spirit, the spirit, however, lifted to become a reasonable master of the body, thereby lending expression to that aristocracy of human personality” Gerling, Reinhold:De weg tot schoonheid en gezondheid [The way to beauty and health] Zeist : Swartsenburg, 1923 p. XIX:

Moral hygiene, typified by its strong emphasis on individual men and women, their strength and endurance in suppressing the senses, clearly had its roots in nineteenth century upper-class liberalism. By the end of the century, this specific type of liberalism at least in continental Europe seems to have played her part, the ‘Zeitgeist’ calling for more collective, indeed more etatist means and measures. From a scientist, and by 1900 that usually meant some sort of a Darwinist point of view, sex and sex education did not only matter for the individual and his or her immaculate soul, but was thought to be affecting the future of the nation or indeed of humankind as such. In an intellectual context, in which the physical and psychological tended to be equalled (“Mens sana in corpore sano”) and both became linked to some conception of heredity, the already intricate relationship between medical and moral arguments had to be negotiated anew. So, in the early twentieth century, moral hygiene gradually merged with medical hygiene, its former arch-fiend, into concepts of social hygiene, in which individual responsibility was paired with the care for the community and the so-called ‘race’
In New Education circles, in which medical doctors and other natural scientists played a considerable role, this shift in ‘medico-moral’ concern can be discerned quite clearly. Edouard Claparède, for example, came to consider (negative) eugenicism to be the major scientific development for progressive educational theory to become practice. Traces of this shift can already be found in Marie Heim’s 1904 speech, in which she stated that sex education begun with the hereditary soundness of the parents – a thesis that for Swiss pedagogy eventually did have practical consequences. Heavily imbued with notions of purity from the onset, the New Education did not merely transport these and other notions of social hygiene. Some of its leading representatives actually thought progressive physical, sexual and moral education directly to contribute the health of individuals and societies.
I feel no need to moralize about that, but historians of ‘classical’ progressive educational thinking do have to face the fact hat the alleged ‘individual freedom’, the so-called New Education wanted to help establish, not seldom went hand in hand with elder conceptions of a very austere morality as well as with ‘social hygiene’ as a means of social technology.

In presenting only a tiny piece of the intricate history of sex education, I hope to have shown the importance of notions of ‘hygiene’ and ‘purity’ for the development of New Education thinking. Secondly, I hope to have made clear that, in order to reconstruct the contexts of New Education discourse, a closer look on networks of scientists and so-called moral activists, in order to study the dissemination of so called medico-moral ideas and ideals, might be a promising strategy. For this, prosopography -the historical study of elites- and network analysis would be of great use to us. Most of all, the insights of those modern historians of science who try to track the various ways in which society and the emerging life-sciences have mutually exchanged concepts and ideas, may contribute greatly to our understandings of New Education coming into being.

Alderik Visser, Berne, July 2004

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Notes:

1) Mesmer (1988) p. 157ff, Vries (1998) p. 67ff.
2) Especially food and drinking (alcohol). Ibidem. Also: Allen (1993), Mooij (1993), Puenzieux (1994), Sauerteig (1999) and Vries (1997).
3) See footnote 2, which is a mere selection of the abundant literature. The exception to the national rule is Hunt (1999), who compares moral purity movements in England and the United States. Most notably in Helmchen (1987) an Oelkers/Osterwalder (2000).
4) Tissot, Samuel Auguste André David: L'onanisme, ou, Dissertation physique sur les maladies produites par la masturbation. Lausanne 1760. On Tissot see Hall 1992 and Mortier 1994
5) Rousseau (1995 (1742)) p. 339ff Rölong (1994) p. 3ff.
6) About these Philanthropes see Koch (2000) as wel ass Röling (1993). In Foucaults ‘La Volonté de Savoir’, this isolated fact is imputed with such an argumentative power, that one in tended to forget that, for contemporaries, this indeed was very radical. Foucault (1983 (1976)) p. 40ff.
6) Carter (2001), Hall (1992), Hunt (1998), Moran (2000) and Röling (1993).
7) Foremost: Moran (2000) and Laqueur (2003).
8) Hall (2000).
9) Heim (1891).
10) Ibidem, p. 4, [transl. A.V.]
11) Ibidem, p. 7, [transl. A.V.]
12) Ibidem, p. 7-8, [transl. A.V.]
13) Ibidem, p. 6, [transl. A.V.]
14) Then: „Denken Sie daran, dass der Weg zum Bordell fast stets über dem Weg zum Wirtshause geht!“ Ibidem, p. 5.
15) Ibidem, S. 4, [transl. A.V.]
16) Foucault (1983 (1976)), commented on by Gutmann (1998).
16) Warne (1999); Lynne Steward (1998); Carter (2001); Röling (1983, 1984); Moran (1998, 2000).
17) Foerster (1904, 1907, 1922 (1907)) References to Foerster are made in almost every article on sex education in Switzerland after ca. 1905, Freethinkers lamenting his alleged conversion, Catholics deeming him too much of a Liberal Protestant and Protestants accusing him of being a Catholic…
18) For example E.M. (1900), in which activities like free play, jumping the rope and warming hands in winter was deemed to endanger sexual morality.
19) Exemplified – among a flood of other examples - by the influential psychiatrist and eugenicist Eugen Bleuler in Bleuler (1908)
20) Born Emma Reichenbach (1854 – 1927), a Christian inspired feminist and abolutionist, with personal contacts in England and the USA. Having studied medicine for a while after her divorce, she wrote a sex education manual for adult women called ‘l’’École de la pureté, which was also translated in Dutch, German and Italian. (Pieczynska 1898).
21) Pieczynska (1910), p. 4.
22) Ibidem, p 16. „Toutefois, quelques conseils de conduite et quelques notions d’hygiène donnée à toute une classe d‘écoliers par un médicine d’un haut caractère morale sont d’une grande autorité. Cette innovation a été tentée avec succès dans quelques écoles de la Suisse Romande.
23) The same sort of experiment, however, being waged in Boston in 1913 See: Moran (1998).
24) See: „Bericht ueber den Ersten Internationalen Kongress für Schulgesundheitspflege“ (1904) and further Carter (2001), Moran (1998) and Warne (1999).
25) Wood 1904a and 1904b, the foreword written by Marie Heim. Woods brochures almost simultaneously appeared in Dutch, French , German and Norwegian and were edited in Australia and Great Britain in 1904-1905. Somewhat later, the evangelical ánd Darwinist inspired booklets appeared in Catholic countries such as Italy, Spain and Poland. The same holds true of the popular sex-education series ‘society and purity’, edited by the Lutheran Minister Sylvanus Stall, that successfully appeared in Europe ca. 1905.
26) Heim (1901 (1900)) The same thing happened with the comparable speeches of Herzen (1897 (1894)), of which a German translation was disseminated all through Germany, as well as with those of Wyss (1901) and Christ (1903), both appeared in Dutch as well.
27) Foerster (1911) and Ortt (1920 (1904)) Foerster was translated by the lesbian radical-socialist Titia van der Tuuk to appear in the Dutch ‘Pure Life-Library’.
28) Sie Vries (1998).
29) Ferrière (1915).
30) Ferrière, quoted in Ce que tous les Parents doivent savoir (1923).
31) Ferrière (1914, 1926).
32) Heim (1907).
33) Reproducing mainly what Pieczynska had written on the topic already. Pieczynska (1903).
34) Ibidem, p. 10. Implying a Lamarckist interpretation of heredity, in which acquired characteristics are thought to influence to psysical and moral state of their descendants. For this Darwinist variety, see Hermans (2003).
35) Ibidem, p. 11, [transl. A.V.]
36) Ibidem, [transl. A.V.]
37) Ibidem, p. 22, [transl. A.V.]
38) Ibidem, p. 12, [transl. A.V.]
39) Ibidem, p. 19f., [transl. A.V.]
40) See for example Houwaard (1991).
41) See (among many others) Mooij (1993); Puenzieux (1994) and Vries (1998).
42) Forel (1908): The Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel may be the best example a ‘moral hygienist’ turning, by 1900, into a ‘social hygienist’, which included some sort of utopian socialism and racial hygiene. (Visser 1998).
43) “Schulhygiene” or “School-healthcare” became a topic all through Europe in the 1870, urged by hygienists and other medics, to ‘die’ practically after the First World War.
44) By the time the ‘movement’ was organised internationally (international congresses in 1904 and 1908, international hygiene-exhibition in Dresden, 1911), the influence of the physicians had all but fainted, but New Education topics had mixed up with the hygienist ones. See „Bericht ueber den Ersten Internationalen Kongress für Schulgesundheitspflege“ (1904) and “Stand der Schulhygiene”.
45) See the Paper presented by Andreas Messerli at this Congress as well as Dudink (1997) and Velde (1991).
In the context of sexual hygiene and sex education, a typical nationalist example of this is shown by Herzen (1894 (1897)).
46) The literature on Darwinism and the different social Darwinisms (the ‘Darwin Industry’) is too abundant to refer to. A recent work on the intermingling of social Darwinisms and society is Hermans (2003).
47) For example Puenzieux (1993), Mooij (1994).
48) Claparède (1914). For Swiss eugenicist pedagogy and psychiatry, see for example Wolfisberg (2002).

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