Sex-Education: A Series of Lectures Concerning Knowledge of Sex in Its Relation to Human Life

In 1914, when speaking openly about sex invited scandal rather than discussion, Maurice A. Bigelow made an audacious proposition: the silence surrounding sexual knowledge was not protecting innocence but breeding harm. These lectures argue that young people deserved informed guidance from parents, educators, and public institutions rather than embarrassed avoidance. Bigelow addresses personal hygiene, reproductive health, and what he terms "societal diseases" with the dispassionate authority of a professor who believed science could improve human lives. He critiques generations of prudish silence that left adolescents to discover sex through rumor and misconception rather than honest instruction. Though written over a century ago, this book reads as a founding document in the ongoing debate about what young people deserve to know and when they deserve to know it.