Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela (review)

Much has been written on the history of sex education in the United States, particularly with reference to the conservative movement in California.¹ The unique contribution of Natalia Mehlman Petrzela's Classroom Wars arises from its success at combining two levels of analysis: a study of the culture wars through the lens of the local debates of two national reform policies; and the juxtaposition of seemingly remote policies—bilingual Spanish language and sex education. The first of these was federally funded and was an antipoverty initiative that was supported by ethnic minorities, while the second was locally financed and was supported by white sexual liberals. This comparison provides interesting insights into the making of American political culture and education in both the 1960s and the present.

Mehlman Petrzela keeps these two levels of analysis strictly separated. Based on her dissertation, the book is divided into two sections—one on language and the other on sex—with four chapters each, covering the nation's ambivalent political struggles not only chronologically throughout the 1960s and 1970s but also through a local lens. Case studies include San Jose, which was the center of Silicon Valley's emerging semiconductor industry and had a growing Mexican American population (chapter 3); Los Angeles, the activist center of desegregation; San Francisco as the center of ideas about creating a cosmopolitan pan-Latinidad (chapter 4); white middle-class San Mateo (chapter 5); and Anaheim, which was built on the industry of family entertainment but which was characterized by a patriotic sheen, profound anticommunism, and racial homogeneity (chapter 6).

Mehlman Petrzela's book joins the ranks of a historiography that depicts the 1960s as an era of "mass movements" (68), intense demographic development, and "seismic cultural changes" (103) such as the sexual revolution. These cultural debates were, she argues, further "galvanized" by legislative changes like the banning of prayer in school. Yet her story is intended as a complex alternative to the common narrative that emphasizes the conservative backlash in the 1970s after an era of liberalism in the 1960s (10). For instance, despite the obvious backlash, the acceptance of sex education programs grew throughout the 1970s (92, 187), and, ironically, it was the conservative demand to limit government oversight of schools that opened up possibilities for the implementation of many diverse and adventurous programs (188). Through the juxtaposition of language and sex education policy, Mehlman Petrzela challenges the previous tendency to emphasize public/private and conservative/liberal divides, and she reveals paradoxes in these debates: both of these reform projects symbolized a progressive educational agenda that recognized diversity and questioned cultural absolutes while simultaneously supporting the rise of an extensive "patriotic morality" among both liberals and conservatives (202). While white parents and policy makers who protested sex education programs demanded the primacy of the family and parental authority over the school, they also argued against bilingual education with the justification that the schoolhouse was a civic, neutral space (6). Petrzela interprets the invigoration of conservative activism as part of cultural mechanisms that remain in force today. The author ventures into this connection to the present by quoting a wide range of historical and current political actors who claim(ed) public schools as their own in order to resolve perceived political and moral crises.

The first half of this book focuses on how political activism changed these debates. School debates become a stage for the constitution of the political, as the author demonstrates through the investigation of the ideologies of dramatis personae like Max Rafferty, Eugene Gonzales, Ernesto Galarza, and Ronald Reagan. Yet Classroom Wars does not confine itself to an analysis of these spokesmen but aims to reach the people caught between the two sides of the debate. Mehlman Petrzela uses letters, newspapers, and student accounts to explore the views of students and their parents. This rich blend of archival accounts, political statements, and curricular...