“Nudists at Heart”: Children’s Nature and Child Psychology in the Postwar Canadian Nudist Movement

While nudism emerged as a corrective to the ill effects of industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century, concern over mental health—and its correlation with normative sexuality—came to the forefront of the postwar Canadian nudist movement. Postwar nudists drew on widely shared notions of childhood innocence and invoked the cultural authority of psychology to provide an ideological rationale and a functional purpose for the movement: they held up children as best exemplifying the unashamed and carefree attitude towards nudity that the movement embraced and simultaneously promoted nudism as a means of teaching children to be self-regulating members of society. This article also argues that nudists echoed postwar parenting experts in making children’s psychological health of paramount concern and by admonishing parents to both accept children’s “natural” urges and to direct their sexual energy into socially acceptable channels.