The Task of Social Hygiene

Havelock Ellis

Description

“The Task of Social Hygiene” is a 1912 work by American writer Havelock Ellis. Social hygiene refers to the protection and improvement of the family as a social institution, specifically through the elimination of sexually transmitted diseases and prostitution. The idea gained popularity during the late 19th and early 20th century centres as a movement which concentrated on regulating vice and disseminating sexual education through the media and using scientific methods. Within this volume, Ellis explores such subjects as sexual hygiene, the woman's suffrage movement, the falling birth-rate in England, love, eugenics, religion, and more. Contents include: “The Changing Status of Women”, “The New Aspect of the Woman's Movement”, “The Emancipation of Women in Relation to Romantic Love”, “The Significance of a Falling Birth-Rate”, “Eugenics and Love”, “Religion and the Child”, “The Problem of Sexual Hygiene”, etc. Henry Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) was an English physician, writer, eugenicist and social reformer who studied human sexuality. Ellis was also an early researcher into the effects of psychedelics and wrote one of the first reports on a mescaline experience in 1896. Other notable works by this author include: “A Study of British Genius” (1904) and “Psychology of Sex” (1933). Read & Co. History is republishing this classic work now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Sujets

• Social distance
• Coronavirus

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 31 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781528791175
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE
By
HAVELOCK ELLIS

First published in 1912



Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. History
This edition is published by Read & Co. History, an imprint of Read & Co.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.
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Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd. For more information visit www.readandcobooks.co.uk


Contents
Ha velock Ellis
PREFACE
I INTRODUCTION
II THE CHANGING STATUS O F WOMEN [45]
III THE NEW ASPECT OF THE WOMA N'S MOVEMENT
IV THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN IN RELATION TO R OMANTIC LOVE
V THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A FALLIN G BIRTH-RATE
VI EUGEN ICS AND LOVE
VII RELIGION A ND THE CHILD
VIII THE PROBLEM OF SE XUAL HYGIENE
IX IMMORALITY AND THE LAW
X THE WAR AGAINST WAR
XI THE PROBLEM OF AN INTERNATIO NAL LANGUAGE
XII INDIVIDUALISM A ND SOCIALISM


Havelock Ellis
Havelock Ellis was born in Croydon, London, England, February 2, 1859. He was a physician, writer and social reformer whose primary interest was in human sexuality and orientation.
The son of Edward Peppen Ellis and Susannah Mary Wheatley, Havelock spent much of his early childhood travelling with his father, who was a sea captain. During one journey Havelock would visit Sydney, Callao and Antwerp. After returning to the United Kingdom, Havelock was educated at French and German College near Wimbledon, as well as at a school in Mitcham.
Upon leaving school, Havelock would continue his travels and sailed on his father’s ship to Australia. He arrived in Sydney, taking a position as a master in a private school, a position for which he had no training. The school, on discovering this fact, fired him and he took a job working for a family as a pr ivate tutor.
His career was stop-start, but eventually he found a position in charge of two elementary schools in New South Wales, where he would settle and write an autobiography. It was during this time that he engaged in profound reflection on his career and was inspired, in part by the solitude of the mountains in New South Wales, to begin a new career as a writer, studyin g sexuality.
After returning to England in 1879 he started on his path to studying human sexuality, and qualified as a physician. He studied first at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, now Kings College, London, which he paid for through his work as an editor of the Mermaid Series of Jac obean drama.
It wasn’t long before Havelock entered into the social circles of prominent English reformers. He would become a close associate of George Bernard Shaw and Edward Carpenter, among others. It was at this time that he published his first work, Sexual Inversion (1897), the first medical textbook on homosexuality, and one penned alongside prominent historian and social critic John Addign ton Symonds.
The text was noted for its objective analysis of homosexuality, treating it neither as disease, immoral choice or crime and described the details of homosexual relationships in London, England at the time. Many of the studies included in his book were between men and young boys, scenes, which many today would consider child abuse.
It is difficult to overstate the effect that Ellis’ work had on later studies of sexuality both in the form of psychoanalysis and as a social phenomenon worthy of study itself. He coined the phrases narcissism and autoerotism, themes that would be placed centre stage in the works of Si gmund Freud.
Ellis was first among his contemporaries to describe in detail the lives and relationships of transgendered people, a typology he called eonism. Ellis attributed the characteristic to a transference of identity from subject to object and described it in terms that would not seem alien to psychoanalysts today. To Ellis, transgendered identities were one’s in limbo between two stages of sexual development: heterosexuality and ho mosexuality.
Ellis was a prominent eugenicist and served as vice president of the Eugenics Education Society. He married the prominent women’s rights activist, Edith Lees, who lived openly as a lesbian in separate accommodation to Ellis and whose relationship would become the central theme of his later autobiography, My Life (1939). By his death on July 8, 1939 Ellis had written over 45 texts on sex, philosophy, social theory and literature, making him one of the most prolific social commentators of the early Twenti eth Century.


PREFACE
The study of social hygiene means the study of those things which concern the welfare of human beings living in societies. There can, therefore, be no study more widely important or more generally interesting. I fear, however, that by many persons social hygiene is vaguely regarded either as a mere extension of sanitary science, or else as an effort to set up an intolerable bureaucracy to oversee every action of our lives, and perhaps even to breed us as catt le are bred.
That is certainly not the point of view from which this book has been written. Plato and Rabelais, Campanella and More, have been among those who announced the principles of social hygiene here set forth. There must be a social order, all these great pioneers recognized, but the health of society, like the health of the body, is marked by expansion as much as by restriction, and, the striving for order is only justified because without order there can be no freedom. If it were not the mission of social hygiene to bring a new joy and a new freedom into life I should not have concerned myself with the writing o f this book.
When we thus contemplate the process of social hygiene, we are no longer in danger of looking upon it as an artificial interference with Nature. It is in the Book of Nature, as Campanella put it, that the laws of life and of government are to be read. Or, as Quesnel said two centuries ago, more precisely for our present purpose, "Nature is universal hygiene." All animals are scrupulous in hygiene; the elaboration of hygiene moves pari passu with the rank of a species in intelligence. Even the cockroach, which lives on what we call filth, spends the greater part of its time in the cultivation of personal cleanliness. And all social hygiene, in its fullest sense, is but an increasingly complex and extended method of purification—the purification of the conditions of life by sound legislation, the purification of our own minds by better knowledge, the purification of our hearts by a growing sense of responsibility, the purification of the race itself by an enlightened eugenics, consciously aiding Nature in her manifest effort to embody new ideals of life. It was not Man, but Nature, who realized the daring and splendid idea—risky as it was—of placing the higher anthropoids on their hind limbs and so liberating their fore-limbs in the service of their nimble and aspiring brains. We may humbly follow in the same path, liberating latent forces of life and suppressing those which no longer serve the present ends of life. For, as Shakespeare said, when in The Winter's Tale he set forth a luminous philosophy of social hygiene and applied it to eugenics,

"Nature is made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean . . .
This is an art
Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is Nature."

In whatever way it may be understood, however, social hygiene is now very much to the front of people's minds. The present volume, I wish to make clear, has not been hastily written to meet any real or supposed demand. It has slowly grown during a period of nearly twenty-five years, and it expresses an attitude which is implicit or explicit in the whole of my work. By some readers, doubtless, it will be seen to constitute an extension in various directions of the arguments developed in the larger work on "Sex in Relation to Society," which is the final volume of my Studies in the Psychology of Sex . The book I now bring forward may, however, be more properly regarded as a presentation of the wider scheme of social reform out of which the more special sex studies have developed. We are faced to-day by the need for vast and complex changes in social organization. In these changes the welfare of individuals and the welfare of communities are alike concerned. Moreover, they are matters which are not confined to the affairs of this nation or of that nation, but of the whole family of nations participating in the fraternity of mode rn progress.
The word "progress," indeed, which falls so easily from our lips is not a word which any serious writer should use without precaution. The conception of "progress" is a useful conception in so far as it binds together those who are working for common ends, and stimulates that perpetual slight movement in which life consists. But there is no general progress in Nature, nor any unqualified progress; that is to say, that there is no progress for all groups along the line, and that even those groups which progress pay the price of their progress. It was so even when our anthropoid ancestors rose to the erect position; that was "progress," and it gained us the use of hands. But it lost us our tails, and much else that is more regrettable than we are always able to realize. There is no general and ever-increasing evolution towards perfection. "Existence is realized in its perfection under whatever aspect it is manifested," says Jules de Gaultier. Or