Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the Twentieth Century (review)

Jeffrey P. Moran. Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. x + 281 pp. $27.95 (0-674-00227-X).

One of the central issues in the presidential campaign of 2000 was the debate over shifts in American moral standards over the past thirty years. Nowhere is this debate more contentious than in arguments over the best way to protect the nation's young people from sexually explicit material in the media and in the classroom. In Teaching Sex, Jeffrey Moran argues that contemporary debates regarding sex education "have failed to look beyond the immediate past for a clearer perspective" (p. 217). He does an excellent job of placing current discussions of adolescent sexuality in historical context. According to Moran, since the "invention" of the sexual adolescent by the renowned child psychologist G. Stanley Hall at the turn of the twentieth century, sex education has been "a hybrid of traditional and modern concerns, of prudery and progressive thought" (p. 25).

During the early twentieth century, new experts in the field of social hygiene-- which included public health physicians, child psychologists trained by Hall, and professional educators--all insisted that modern scientific methods were the best way to combat venereal disease, unwed pregnancy, and other social dangers caused by unchecked adolescent sexual behavior. Moran skillfully demonstrates that the central tenet, and major shortcoming, of the progressive approach to sex education was an instrumentalist vision of how to transmit ideas to young people. Social hygienists believed that scientific evidence about the dangers of sexual activity, if presented in a rational manner, could be used to change adolescent behavior, and that the public schools were the most appropriate venue for such instruction since they could reach the largest portion of American youth.

Yet putting these ideas into practice proved difficult during the early twentieth century, when a Victorian reticence about sexual matters still prevailed. Sex education programs also reinforced Americans' suspicions about the intrusion of state institutions into private matters. Although sex educators succeeded in challenging the Victorian "conspiracy of silence," they, like their opponents, "shared a deep discomfort with the youthful sexuality they were pledged to regulate" (p. 25). Despite broader social anxieties about venereal disease and sexual delinquency, sex education remained so controversial that progressive social hygienists were forced to dilute their message to the point that the sex education curriculum they supported contained no mention of the sexual act itself. It was sex education without the sex.

This mixture of medicine and morality continued to shape sex education, even in the face of profound changes in both adolescent sexual behavior and broader social views about human sexuality. According to Moran, the "revolution in [both] manners and morals" following the First World War simply confirmed sex educators' commitment to protecting teenagers from their natural hormonal urges. Sex education became temporarily divorced from venereal disease prevention during the 1950s, when the emphasis of sex education curricula shifted toward courses in Family Life Education (FLE) that prepared adolescents for marriage and parenthood. Yet like its predecessors, FLE remained virtually silent about sex itself, with the exception of graphic films depicting the ravages of venereal disease. The idea that adolescent sexuality was inherently pathological never disappeared, and it came roaring back to life during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its aftermath. The alleged "epidemic" of teenage pregnancy in the 1970s and the appearance of AIDS in the 1980s were used by sex educators to justify improvements in sex education curricula as well as increased federal and state spending for contraception and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. At the same time, conservatives attacked sex education programs, claiming that these courses actually contributed to declining moral standards.

Moran convincingly argues that while conservative and liberal perspectives on sex education seemed "superficially opposed to each other," they were in fact "flip sides of the same...