Educació i sexualitat: de la crisi de final de segle a l'època d'entreguerres

Abstract

The first part of the article tries to determine the depth of the changes that took place in the discourse of the traditional moral sexuality during this period, marked by the effects of industrialization in the cities, the claims of the first feminisms, the denunciations of hygienism, eugenesy and psychoanalysis, the concerns of the European Regenerationist Movement around prostitution, the irruption of young people in the sociopolitical panorama and the general demands for sexual education. In the second part, the article analyses how this situation is felt in Catalonia and Spain, highlighting the reception of the mentioned changing factors in Catalonia, the degree of incidence detected in the different social, scientific, intellectual and educational sectors, and the peculiarities shown from Spain's own sociopolitical and cultural idiosyncrasy of the period. Both in the first and the second part of the article, the central characters and their most significant works occupy a preferential place. The conclusion of this analysis is that what looked like the beginning of a sexual revolution in the period between the 19th and the 20th centuries only changed formal aspects of the moral tradition, therefore making hardly acceptable the enthusiastic conclusions of some analysts that qualify these changes as the first sexual revolution.