“How Far Should We Go?”: Adolescent Sexual Activity and Understandings of the Sexual Life Cycle in Postwar Britain

Abstract

I n 1965 t h e s o c I o l o g I s t M I c h a e l s c h o f I e l d published the first major survey of teenage sexuality in Britain.1 Researchers from the Central Council for Health Education had interviewed more than eigh­ teen hundred young people between age fifteen and nineteen. Beyond ask­ ing these teenagers about their attitudes toward sex, the survey prompted them to assess their levels of sexual knowledge and to evaluate the sex education they had received. Most notably, the survey recorded details of their sexual practice, including incidences of kissing, “petting,” and pene­ trative intercourse. The somewhat “unsensational” central finding of the research was that “premarital sexual relations are a long way from being universal . . . for well over three­quarters of the boys and girls in our sample have never engaged in them.”2 Underpinning Schofield’s study was an assumption that there was something distinctive about teenage sexuality and that accounts of modern sexuality were missing something by having neglected to consider young people’s sexual attitudes and practices. Schofield’s survey was certainly a turning point in studies of British sexuality insofar as it was the first major study to interrogate premarital sexuality. However, Schofield’s impulse to investigate and quantify teenage sexuality was indicative of a longer­term shift in which sexuality became increasingly understood as an organizing marker of the life cycle. In the decades after the Second World War, the