Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870-1924

2. Championing the Chicago Experiment

two ? Championing the Chicago Experiment In the fall of 1913, over twenty thousand Chicago high school students completed the first public sex-education program in U.S. schools.The program consisted of three lessons designed to inform students about “personal sexual hygiene,” “problems of sex instincts,” and “a few of the hygienic and social facts regarding venereal disease,” respectively.1 The previous year, the founder of the program and superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, Dr. Ella Flagg Young, had proposed to the Chicago Board of Education “that specialists in sex hygiene who lecture in simple, yet scientifically correct language,” provide such a course in all twenty-one high schools.2 Young insisted that the courses be accessible and easy to understand. She also resolved that they be separated by sex to respect norms of modesty and that their content be grounded in recognized scientific facts. Yet members of the board still resisted instituting a program their constituents were sure to reject, especially in an era when Comstock laws remained influential. The ChicagoTribune reported that Young “had been told she had better not advocate the adoption of instruction of sex hygiene in the schools because in so doing she would arouse the opposition, then dormant, of certain members of the school board.”3 Yet advocate she did. By the end of the summer, after Young agreed to change the name of the “sex-hygiene” talks to “personalpurity ” lessons, she had not only convinced the Board of Education to vote in favor of her Chicago Experiment, she had garnered enough community support to institute the initiative that fall. In the spring of 1913, a sample of female graduates of Young’s program was asked to critique the personal-purity lessons. Their statements provide insight into how desperately many young women needed information about sex at this time, as well as how difficult it was for them to talk about sex at all. One high school freshman wrote of her lack of knowledge concerning anything related to sex before her attendance at the social-purity lessons, explaining that her “instincts and imagination told me some things and then I overheard a conversation between mother and a lady visitor, so guessed at part of it, but I did not have any definite information until the [personalpurity lessons].”4 Older students also used vague language to report their lack of parental guidance and high degree of confusion about sex. Many of them cited similarly uninformed peers as their primary source for information about puberty, reproduction, and sex. A high school junior explained, “Got my first information from my girl friends. Was very glad to hear lectures and want to hear more, for while my mother knows a lot, she won’t tell me a thing.” Likewise, a high school senior lamented, “Mother told me about menstrual periods after they arrived,” and, “I was told a great many things by girl friends at ten years of age which I did not understand very well.” After completing the Chicago Experiment’s courses, she concluded “that I should have been told earlier by an older person and not by girls who had a wrong view.”5 This young woman waited seven or eight years before escaping the “dark view” of sex-related issues she developed after receiving information about sex from children. Prior to attending the lessons, all three of these young women were so uninformed about “things” that they were unprepared for the changes in their bodies, as well as for the physical and emotional transformations accompanying such changes. Their comments demonstrate that they were extremely grateful and quite relieved to attend the school’s social-purity lessons. That girls, most of whom were working-class immigrants, would have access to such lessons was unprecedented.Young’s inclusive approach to sex education, targeting girls and boys, immigrants and the poor, young and old, introduced U.S. citizens to a brand of sex education that was truly public. Young’s ideas, and the strategically fragmented argumentation style she used to present them, were an important departure from the rhetorical patterns of ambiguous language underlying most discussions about sex education. Championing the Chicago Experiment / 37 While sex education initiated by social hygienists, social purists, and freelove advocates often targeted men, native-born Americans, and the middle to upper classes, the Chicago Experiment targeted all young people attending Chicago public schools.At this time, the majority of Chicago...