1904 Victorian Era sex ed - Safe Counsel Furthering of Start of Eugenics Movements Reasoning

The full title of this book by B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols is Search Lights on Health or Light on Dark Corners: A Complete Sexual Science and A Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood.

Advice to Maiden, Wife, and Mother. Love, Courtship, And Marriage. Copyrighted 1904.

This book is enjoyable on different levels. To the serious student of social attitudes and mores in the early 1900s it is a fascinating read.

To many, however, it is simply hilarious, or perhaps disturbing.

In later editions the authors shifted much of their focus to eugenics but in this early edition there was ample education to use for the eugenics movement

Instead, the early chapters deal with such benign topics as how to write a letter, etiquette, and the evils of the corset. From page 114 on the focus shifts to love, sex and marriage.

The advice is not altogether horrible, and I suppose by the standard of the times the authors might even have been considered enlightened. But much of what they have to say would, by todays standards, be considered outrageous or laughable. Here are just a few nuggets of wisdom I pulled out of the book at random.

Marriage purifies the complexion, removes blotches from the skin .

Red-whiskered men should marry brunettes, but no blondes; the color of the whiskers being more determinate of the temperament than that of the hair.

persons who have twins are generally those who have great sexual vigor.

A whale man was severely hurt, in his right side. His daughter, closely resembling him in looks has a weak and sore place corresponding in location with that of the injury of her father.

Conception in the first half of the time between the menstrual periods produces females, and males in the latter.

This book has some striking similarities to a later book by Shannon and Fallows on Eugenics. Both have the words Safe Counsel on the cover though this does not seem to be part of either of the official titles.