-
Introduction
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction On August 22, 1996, the 104th U.S. Congress and President William J. Clinton, a Democrat, passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Better known as the 1996 Welfare Reform Bill, this act drastically altered how and to whom welfare benefits are granted in the United States. What many people do not know is that the Welfare Reform Bill also censored public education about sexual health. The bill included the controversial provision that abstinence-education programs be the only federally funded sex-education curricula in U.S. schools. The act defined abstinence education (known today as “abstinence-only” or “abstinence-only-until-marriage” education) as any program that “has as its exclusive purpose, teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity.” More than a decade later, the government still provides federal support exclusively to schools that offer students abstinence-only education.1 School districts that want to provide students with information about topics such as contraception, abortion, or homosexuality must go without federal funding. Consequently, many young people confront issues like HIV/AIDS and unintended pregnancy without adequate information about prevention or health care. This problem is particularly difficult to ignore when adolescents in the United States suffer from comparatively higher rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), abortions, and unwanted pregnancies than do adolescents in most other developed countries.2 Questions about how to approach public sex education seem fixed at the center of U.S. politics.Advocates of comprehensive sexuality education cite studies highlighting the failure of abstinence-only programs to reduce STIs, teenage pregnancies, and abortions.3 Abstinence-only advocates argue that teaching young people about STIs and pregnancy prevention (i.e., teaching them about “safe sex”) also teaches them that sex outside of marriage is permissible. Congressional hearings regularly focus on the content of public sex-education instruction without resolution. School-board meetings become shouting matches over the distribution of condoms in secondary schools. And political candidates avoid discussing sex education on the campaign trail to prevent alienating constituencies. The country’s current sociopolitical condition begs a number of critical questions: When did this debate about public sex education begin? How and why did Americans initially introduce the concept of sex education into the public imaginary? What were the major sources of support for and resistance to this movement ? And, most importantly, why has the United States made so little progress in keeping residents free of disease and informed about sex? This book answers these questions by examining rhetorical appeals for and against public sex education in late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury U.S.history,as well as public sex-education campaigns and materials. This book offers a story of the emergence of public sex education in the United States that has yet to be told because much of the featured discourse has been erroneously framed as marginal. It is the story of an inner-city educator convincing decision makers and laypeople to include “social purity” courses in public schools, and the story of a Russian immigrant persuading those in power that populations of women, immigrants, minorities, and the poor constituted important members of the public in need of sex education. It is the story of public health advocates creating lecture series, traveling poster campaigns, and medical education about venereal diseases and human reproduction. It is the story of the historical and discursive forces that have framed this work. It is the story of determined women with a vision of truly public sex education and the ethical compromises they made for the sake of that vision. And it is the story of the historically appropriate rhetorical tools public health advocates have used to garner support for increasingly inclusive public sex-education initiatives. This story transpires amid a discursive setting of ambiguous language because much sex-education discourse in U.S. history has been clouded by ambiguity. Communication is ambiguous when its meaning is difficult to pin down, when the signifier’s signified, as the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure would put it, may be a number of different concepts, and the receiver of the message could read its meaning in a variety of conflicting ways.4 All language is potentially ambiguous because an inescapable lacuna exists between what one says and what one means or thinks.5 But some language is decidedly more ambiguous than other language, and speakers sometimes employ ambiguity strategically to appeal to several different factions at once. The problem with strategic ambiguity in the...