Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education before the 1960s

4. The Facts of Life

4 The Facts of Life Physical changes occur constantly as individuals develop from infancy into adulthood, and mid-twentieth-century sex educators singled out the accelerated growth process known as puberty as a special moment in life. “It is the biological changes that set the adolescent period apart for special consideration,” explained education professor Ruth Strang in her text on the psychology of adolescence, adding that sexual maturity was “of central importance.”1 Puberty referred to the acquisition of physical, sexual maturity during the early teenaged years, a period of rapid growth thought to bring emotional adjustments supposedly unique to adolescence. Educators understood adolescence as the phase accompanying puberty and encompassing psychological adaptation to the changing physical body as well as social norms. School officials paid great attention to puberty and adolescence during the twentieth century, inaugurating separate “junior” high schools beginning in the 1920s to attend to the specific needs of pubescent youth.2 Not only did educators find it useful to separate younger adolescents from their older and younger peers, but they also began to develop curricula that directly confronted questions and problems of adolescents. In San Diego, for example, instructors began teaching about puberty just before students entered junior high school. They prepared the pupils with the knowledge that puberty brought the ability to procreate, and they acknowledged adolescence as “the time at which boys and girls start to become young men and women.”3 As a period between childhood and adulthood, adolescence brought new physical capacities, increasingly differentiated norms of conduct for boys and girls, and increasingly expected attraction for the other sex. Sex instruci -xviii_1-222_Free.indd 69 4/22/08 4:03:06 PM 70 . sex goes to school tion aimed to help young people adjust to the physiology of their changing bodies; it also reinforced awareness and appreciation of heterosexuality that conformed to social norms. Educators faced a conundrum in formulating sex education, given the sexual capabilities of adolescent bodies and the social proscriptions against sexual behavior. Teachers and other professionals wanted young people to gain knowledge and appreciation of sex, but they did not want them, especially girls, to flaunt their bodies or engage in intercourse. Thus, sex education curricula relied heavily on gender socialization to blunt the suggestion that adolescent bodies were ready to engage in sex. Because physical sexual maturity preceded the age at which it was acceptable to marry and engage in intercourse, according to the norms of the day, sex education pedagogy explained physical changes while guiding young people to develop a heterosexual orientation. Adolescent heterosexuality promised to bring emotional fulfillment and social rewards but not sexual consummation before the engagement and marriage that all young people were encouraged to envision. Girls’ bodies mature earlier than boys’, and educators were concerned with the implications of physical maturity for girls’ safety as well as psychological and heterosexual adjustment. Mid-century pubescent girls typically experienced menarche, or the onset of menstruation, around age twelve.4 If menarche is a relatively concealed event, the development of breasts is more visible. Popular and professional messages about managing girls’ breasts reveal the contradictory quality of education and socialization meant to help with adjustment. “A girl of six years may run around in a sun-suit with practically no bra,” observed psychologist Helen Kitchen Branson in 1953, but one of thirteen who had begun to menstruate should not. Breast development implied sexual readiness, and it was girls’ responsibility to keep their breasts inconspicuous, she argued.5 Entrepreneurs and health professionals promoted brassieres for developing girls, but concern with physical and moral support competed with messages in mid-century popular culture such as the youthful “sweater girl,” her breasts proudly protruding from a tight sweater.6 Goodrich C. Schauffler, a medical doctor, reported to colleagues at a 1954 professional meeting in Chicago that adolescent girls’ psychological stability was at stake. He attributed a “bosom inferiority complex” to padded bras as well as the extreme cases of “attempted suicide and total derangements contingent upon real or fancied breast irregularities.”7 As their figures developed, girls were prone to attract male attention, which, on the one hand, might awaken girls’ heterosexual consciousness— i-xviii_1-222_Free.indd 70 4/22/08 4:03:06 PM the facts of life · 71 a result educators believed normal and desirable. On the other hand, girls’ visible development could attract danger, leading to precocious consensual sexual activity or what is...