NEWS from one hundred years ago: SEXUAL MORALITY

A lot of conservative people are saying that the First World War and the postwar years have ushered in a more relaxed code of sexual morality. A clergyman speaking at the Dunedin Men's Mission reports an ‘alarming increase’ in the number of men walking out on their marriages and ‘a growing tendency to open adultery and a great increase in immorality.’ The Otago Daily Times editorialises today that there was probably no time in the history of New Zealand ‘when the marriage relation was more lightly entered upon by both sexes and when the consequent parental responsibilities were less seriously regarded, if indeed not altogether evaded.’ The newspaper goes on to say: ‘The crop of divorces and separations, the frequency of wife desertions, the multiplication of orphanages ... to say nothing of the continually reported cases of infanticide, abortion, and other sexual offences, constitute alarming phenomena.’ At the same time, the Otago Daily Times astutely observes that perhaps the real change is not in behaviour but in frankness and honesty. ‘It is not safe ... to assume that the social morality of to-day is on a lower level than, say, fifty years ago; only with the spread of knowledge and a wider outlook public opinion on such matters as marriage and morality has undergone a surprising change and the expression in everyday life differs considerably.’

Otago Daily Times, 22 September 1920