Sex Manuals and Censorship

Definition: Books that offer sex education and instruction

Significance: Courts have consistently rejected notions that manuals meant for sex education are obscene

Until 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court applied the standard of the 1868 English case Regina v. Hicklin to its definition of obscenity. The Hicklin decision found material obscene if it had a “tendency” to corrupt the sexual morality of vulnerable individuals. Under U.S. postal regulations, it was forbidden to send obscene matter through the mails. In 1930 a Pennsylvania housewife, Mrs. Dennett, decided that she wanted her two adolescent boys to know more about sexual relations. She searched her local library for help but decided that the materials available were not suitable; she thus wrote and published her own instruction book, a brief pamphlet called The Sex Side of Life. When she mailed a copy of the pamphlet to a friend in Virginia, she was arrested and convicted by a federal district court of violating postal law. Her lawyer argued that her manual was meant only for educational purposes. The judge, however, instructed the jury that the manual’s purpose meant nothing; all they had to do was decide whether Dennett’s work was “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” under the rule. The jury found her guilty, and Dennett was fined three hundred dollars.

Dennett took her case to a federal appellate court, which in United States v. Dennett (1930) reversed the decision. Judges on the appeal panel praised the work and recommended it as useful in instructing the young. The court described the Hicklin test as outdated and challenged its definition of obscenity. If the Hicklin standard were to continue to be used, the court noted, “much chaste poetry and fiction, as well as many useful medical works” would be banned.

In the same year, however, the U.S. Customs seized several thousand copies of Married Love, a manual by Marie Stopes, a British scientist and sex educator. The book, which had been sold in England for more than thirty years, was declared obscene by customs agents under provisions of the Tariff Act of 1930. The law required the Customs Service to take seized material to federal court for review for alleged obscenity. Stopes’s book contained expressions of feminist philosophy along with explicit advice on making love. The judge deciding the case found against the Customs Service: “I cannot imagine a normal mind to whom this book would seem to be obscene or immoral within the proper definition of these words or whose sex impulses would be stirred by reading it,” he concluded. The book was thus freed for sale in the United States; by 1939, more than one million copies had been sold.

A new standard was established in 1957 in Roth v. United States, in which the Supreme Court held that the effect of a work taken as a whole must be used to judge obscenity. The debate over sex manuals subsequently shifted largely to local school boards and their debates over what books to use in sex-education classes. In most cases, school boards have allowed parents who do not want their children to read sexually explicit material to excuse their children from sex-education requirements.

Bibliography

Chen, Constance M. "The Sex Side of Life": Mary Ware Dennett's Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education. New York: New, 1996. Print.

"Formerly Banned Sex Manual to Go Under the Hammer in Edinburgh." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 3 Jan. 2013. Web. 23 Nov. 2015.

Heins, Marjorie. Not in Front of the Children: "Indecency," Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2007. Print.

Levine, Judith. Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 2003. Print.

Semonche, John E. Censoring Sex: A Historical Journey through American Media. Lanham: Rowman, 2007. Print.