What Every Mother Should Know, or, How Six Little Children Were Taught the Truth

Sanger, Margaret, 1879-1966Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.1

Word count: 70K words
Chapters: 7

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.What Every Mother Should Know; or, How Six Little Children Were Taught The TruthAuthor: Sanger, Margaret, 1879-1966,Language: English, Class: HQ: Social sciences: The family, Marriage, Sex and Gender, Release Date: Mar 26, 2018

Editor's review

This is a public-domain eBook written in English by Margaret Sanger, with a title literally meaning "What Every Mother Should Know; or, How Six Little Children Were Taught the Truth." Classified as a social-science work on the family, marriage, and gender, it unfolds through the education of six children, placing sex education and family communication in concrete situations. Its value lies not in offering a contemporary medical or educational guide but in presenting a historical text from early sex-education discussions: readers can see how society then understood "telling children the truth" and the role assigned to mothers in family enlightenment. Read it with historical distance, as material for intellectual and educational history, rather than adopting its ideas and methods wholesale. For those studying family history, the history of sex education, or Sanger's intellectual trajectory, this small book offers a specific, finely grained slice.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers and researchers studying the history of sex education, family history, or social thought
Educators interested in family communication who want to understand early texts on sex education
Readers interested in Margaret Sanger's intellectual background who can read the English original
Teachers and students who need historical materials for courses on gender and the family

Not a good fit for

Parents seeking guidance on contemporary, scientifically grounded sex education
General readers who struggle with English and need a Chinese translation
Readers expecting systematic medical knowledge and theories of child psychological development

Reading tips

Learn about the period and the author's background before reading the main text, and avoid judging it directly by contemporary standards.
Read the stories of the six children as case studies, noting the educational assumptions and period assumptions embedded in the narrative.
Take brief notes while reading, distinguishing ideas in the historical text from communication approaches that may still be useful today.
Read alongside contemporary works on sex education or parent-child communication to create a dialogue between past and present.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book suitable as a direct parenting guide for today's parents?

It should not be adopted wholesale. It is a sex education text from a particular historical period, and its ideas and expressions carry the limitations of that era; its methods are far removed from today's scientifically grounded sex education and research on child psychological development. It is better read as historical material to understand how early family sex education was discussed, and then supplemented with contemporary authoritative sources.

Are the "six children" in the book real cases?

From the available information, the title indicates that the book uses the process of teaching six children "the truth" as its narrative thread, but the existing information is not enough to confirm whether these children were real cases recorded by the author. Readers should understand them as a narrative framework the author used to organize the discussion, not as a strictly empirical collection of cases.

What English foundation is needed to read this book?

The original is in English and was written early, with somewhat old-fashioned vocabulary and sentence patterns. Readers with CET-4 or above and a willingness to look up unfamiliar words can read it through; those with weaker English can first use translation tools to grasp the gist of chapters, then read key passages.

How does this book help in studying Sanger's thought?

It presents a specific text in which Sanger discusses the family, the role of mothers, and sex education, helping to show how she placed "telling children the truth" within a family education framework. Researchers can read it alongside her other writings and related historical materials, and avoid drawing conclusions from a single text.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Sanger, Margaret, 1879-1966 Author

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) was a pioneering figure in the American birth control movement, though the materials available here offer limited information about her full life and educational background. This site holds seven of her works, including the autobiography Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, the youth-oriented sex education books What Every Girl Should Know and What Every Mother Should Know, and treatises such as The Case for Birth Control, Family Limitation, Woman and the New Race, and The Pivot of Civilization. Her writing is marked by a clear social reform stance and accessible, reasoned argument, often approaching birth control through women's health and family livelihood and bringing the issue into public discussion, with a lasting influence on the spread of related ideas in the first half of the twentieth century.