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

5. Gender and Heterosexual Adjustment

5 Gender and Heterosexual Adjustment “The emotional and social factors involved [in sex education] are of equal if not greater importance than the child’s acquisition of information on the physiology of sex and reproduction,” explained the authors of “The School’s Responsibility in Social Hygiene Education” in 1940. “So conceived,” they argued, “sex education is an inseparable part of the education of the total personality of the child.”1 In fact, teachers devoted a large proportion of the time spent in sex education and family living classes to matters that were only remotely connected to the physical body. As was especially apparent in teaching about menstruation, lessons often provided more advice about conduct and mental health than about physiology. Learning about the body, the sexual organs, and their reproductive capacities was one facet of learning what it meant to acquire maturity. But it was sexuality’s mental and psychological components—how young people imagined and enacted gender and sexuality—that was at the heart of instruction and discussion in the public schools of the 1940s and 1950s. During the mid-twentieth century, adolescence was perceived as a critical moment for adjusting to sex, gender, and heterosexuality. Educators sought to channel young people’s interests according to gender, but they did not wish to turn interest in gender and sexuality into preoccupation or prurience . “To accept one’s physique and masculine or feminine role” and “to develop new relations with age mates of both sexes,” the Detroit, Michigan, source book for family life education in the late 1950s posited, were the first two “developmental tasks” of adolescence.2 Accepting sex differences, or the distinctions between being male and female, was crucial to building an i-xviii_1-222_Free.indd 100 4/22/08 4:03:10 PM gender and heterosexual adjustment · 101 individual identity and wholesome relationships between the sexes during adolescence. Courses aimed at adolescents conveyed how gender roles and relationships with the other sex were significant to mental health as well as future life choices. Educators prepared young people to pursue marriage and parenthood, and they were prone to treat the nuclear family, consisting of a married couple and a few children living apart from extended family, as the ideal and norm. Their representations of married couples with children contained racial and class subtexts, idealizing the masculine and feminine features of white, economically advantaged men and women.3 This chapter explores how sex educators presented what they called “sex differences” as well as “boy-girl relationships”—topics linked to sexuality but more clearly about gendered behaviors and heterosexual identity. I maintain that educators exalted normative femininity, masculinity, and heterosexuality as tools for resolving the concerns and problems of adolescents. Teachers promoted adjustment to contemporary gender norms and heterosexuality in hopes of reducing individual anxieties among students of diverse backgrounds . In the process, they infused the curricula with a psychological framework that privileged adjustment and maturity but acknowledged a variety of experiences and realities. This psychological framework thus empowered young people to develop their individual personalities and preferences , but it invoked the fine line between “normal” gender and heterosexual interests and the extremes of disinterest or obsession. Teachers wanted to encourage respect for femininity, masculinity, and heterosexuality but sought to avoid making the realm of sexuality too enticing. Although conservative beliefs about gender and heterosexuality pervaded classroom material and circumscribed teachers’ perspectives, sex education ’s psychological bent helped weaken moral and biological absolutes.4 On the one hand, sex education curricula’s language of psychology, personality, fulfillment, and purpose encouraged girls’ development of subjectivity and autonomy and therefore stood to empower girls. On the other hand, heterosexual gender roles and social ideals of the dominant culture, especially by the 1950s, prescribed a limited range of options for teenagers, in particular girls. As school material alternated between reinforcing the status quo and offering new options, girls gained opportunities to formulate their futures. Independent living and college campuses offered freedom for exploration and dissent in the 1960s, fueling the decade’s sexual revolution.5 Yet the possibilities for questioning sexual and gender norms emerged in earlier decades, and earlier in the life-cycles of mid-twentieth-century girls, through an unlikely source: public schools. i-xviii_1-222_Free.indd 101 4/22/08 4:03:10 PM 102 . sex goes to school Femininity As an ideal, femininity is a form of gender performance; women and girls are not inherently feminine but...