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

3. Experiments in Sex Education

3 Experiments in Sex Education By the mid-1930s, teachers were beginning to introduce sexuality in classrooms from a human behavior and relationships standpoint. Professional journals between 1935 and 1939 publicized that schools in Michigan, Oklahoma, Colorado, Illinois, and the District of Columbia were newly conducting programs in sex education.1 Most, however, faded from the professional literature as quickly as they appeared, and none came to the attention of the broader public. In the late 1930s, newspapers and magazines publicized a debate in New York City concerning a board of education member’s unsuccessful campaign for sex education in the city’s high schools.2 Accounts in subsequent years would reveal that some schools taught sex education without controversy in the 1930s, but many indicated that their success was in proportion to their discretion.3 Although publicized sex education was rare, quiet efforts around the country were not. Some were far enough under the radar of state authorities and researchers that a major survey of sex education in high schools that sociologist John Newton Baker undertook in the early 1940s overlooked them.4 Baker’s survey found negligible attention to sex education in twenty-seven states. He located courses in school districts that lacked statewide support in nine states. Finally, he identified ten states that offered institutional support for sex education programs. All regions of the country were represented in each category except the South, which, Baker claimed, lacked state government support for school programs in sex education in the early 1940s.5 However helpful such data may be in identifying regional and national trends, they neglected to account for existing programs in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Missouri, and probably elsewhere.6 i-xviii_1-222_Free.indd 45 4/22/08 4:03:02 PM 46 . sex goes to school In the late 1930s, those who initiated new programs in sex education included the western state of Oregon, the small East Coast community of Toms River, New Jersey, and an urban city on the U.S.-Mexico border, San Diego, California. Founders of these programs were proud of their work and eager to spread the word. Prompted by local events and promoted by local leaders, each of the three initiatives was several years in the making. Although not the only programs with national recognition, Oregon, Toms River, and San Diego graced the pages of local newspapers, mass-circulation magazines, and scholarly publications, making them the most publicized and familiar nationwide in the 1940s and 1950s. Meanwhile, many of the nation’s educators engaged in what might be considered auxiliary activities, some of which were first steps toward offering sex education in schools. Community forums, institutes, workshops, and teacher training classes sponsored by social hygiene societies, parent and teacher groups, universities and colleges, and state departments of health and education proliferated in the 1930s and after.7 The programs in Oregon, Toms River, and San Diego had roots in local community forums and social hygiene groups, but they emphasized educating young people rather than adults. Accounts of Oregon, Toms River, and San Diego demonstrate the various ways in which educators approached sex education in schools and prioritized their goals; they represent a range of strategies replicated in schools across the nation. Although they did not exhaust the possibilities, they encompass the most influential models. Numerous programs across the nation and a few outside the United States contained elements of the Oregon, Toms River, and San Diego models.8 In the tradition of sex education developed earlier in the century, Oregon educators began introducing the topic in health and science classes in the 1940s, positioning information about sexual organs and functions within a biological narrative of human reproduction and personal hygiene. In this model, designed for older elementary and junior high students, the “facts of life”—a common euphemism for information about sex—were the focus but not to the neglect of questions about personality and conduct. Educators and administrators employing the “Oregon method” followed the example of the Oregon-produced classroom movie Human Growth (1947), which encouraged boys and girls to discuss puberty, human development, and reproduction with their usual teacher in their ordinary classroom, without fanfare or an outside specialist.9 The high school family relationships course in Toms River exemplified school personnel’s growing interest in human relations within families, and i-xviii_1-222_Free.indd 46 4/22/08 4:03:02 PM experiments in sex education...