Sex in the Schools: Adolescence, Sex Education, and Social Reform

Jeffrey P. Moran. Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. 281 pp. Notes and index. $27.95.

Many American adults have memories, however vivid or vague, of sex education classes they took in school. Elderly men and women who came of age during the 1920s might recall learning about the "birds and the bees" during a biology class. Some men who hit the rocky shores of adolescence during World War II might remember teachers expounding upon the threat of venereal disease to the sanctity of family life. Many women who were teenagers during the 1950s may recall an assignment which required them to plan a mock wedding, complete with a pretend gift registry. More recently, youth in the 1990s have learned about birth control and protection against AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Indeed, the experiences of adolescents with respect to sex education have varied since the subject became part of secondary school curricula beginning in the 1910s. And certainly, the reactions of youth to such instruction have ranged from fascination to boredom to utter contempt.

So too have the motivations and methods of professional sex educators--including physicians, teachers, nurses, school administrators, public health advocates and college professors--differed over the course of the twentieth century. The shifting social, cultural and political terrain upon which educators have instructed American youth about sexual affairs is the subject of Jeffrey P. Moran's new book Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century. Focusing primarily on the social scientists, educators and other experts who instituted, altered, and contested sex education programs in the nation's schools, Teaching Sex makes a significant contribution to the historiography of twentieth-century America. It should be of particular interest to historians of sexuality, childhood and youth, education, and public health, as well as to people outside the historical profession who are concerned about the pressing issues that still inform efforts to educate young Americans in matters sexual.

Moran's inquiry begins with the "invention of the sexual adolescent" by the influential psychologist G. Stanley Hall. In 1904, at the age of sixty-nine, Hall published a two-volume work titled Adolescence, which synthesized decades of the author's pioneering research in the burgeoning child-study movement. Only after the publication of this comprehensive book did Americans begin to speak about "adolescence" as a major stage in the human life cycle and "adolescents" as an age-based category of the human population. Viewing the concept as a complex problem of physical maturation, cognitive growth, and emotional expression, Hall defined adolescence to connote the period of life marked by puberty, the stage of development when one becomes capable of sexual reproduction.

But if adolescence in Hall's estimation was characterized by sexual capability, it was also predicated upon sexual restraint. Indeed, as Moran explains, "adolescence was precisely that period of chastity between puberty, or sexual awakening, and marriage, when the young man or woman's sexual impulses could finally be expressed" (p. 15). Although his magnum opus was literally produced during the twentieth century, Hall himself was a product of the nineteenth--an heir to the tradition of Victorian "civilized morality" and its ideals of character and virtue. In the first of many biographical sketches offered throughout the book, Moran describes how Hall was schooled in the conventional sexual wisdom shared by white, middle-class, religious families in the rural 1850s. Taught that masturbation and other intimate encounters would lead to feeblemindedness and physical deformity, Hall spent his boyhood and early adulthood practically obsessed with controlling expressions of sexual desire. Influenced by his personal history as well as broader currents of thought, Hall placed chastity at the heart of his theory of adolescence. The central problem of modern adolescence was one of sexual sublimation: How could young men and women learn to master temptation until safely ensconced in...