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Too Hot to Handle
A Global History of Sex Education
By Jonathan Zimmerman PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-6586-4
CHAPTER 1
The Birds, the Bees, and the Globe
THE ORIGINS OF SEX EDUCATION, 1898–1939
In March 1928, a British delegation presented a resolution on behalf of "Biological Education" to the League of Nations' Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Protection of Children. Thus far the committee had focused mainly on international treaties and other legal mechanisms to stem prostitution and venereal disease. Yet the "root cause" of these ills lay in the "demand for promiscuity," the British delegation wrote, which could only be lowered via education. "A carefully devised scheme of biological training could not fail to stimulate a sense of individual responsibility in the exercise of the racial function," the British resolution declared. Here it drew upon eugenic theory, which held that sexual impropriety—especially relations outside of marriage—threatened to erode the strength and dominance of white populations. The resolution also announced a gift from the American Social Hygiene Association, which had pledged $5,000 to the committee for "an inquiry into the methods adopted in various countries for the imparting of sex knowledge to young people." In an attached outline of the proposed study, the British delegates noted that "isolated experiments" in sex education were already underway in several nations. A full investigation would allow them to pool their knowledge, which would in turn unleash a worldwide wave of "sexual enlightenment."
But the League of Nations committee rejected the proposal as well as the American money attached to it, highlighting deep ambivalence about sex education around the globe. Even as he denounced the "fairy tales and half-truths" told to children about sex, a Danish representative insisted that "private persons or organisations"—not state-run schools—should counter these falsehoods. In Japan, where sex instruction was part of the school biology curriculum, the subject had come under fire from conservatives; the "burning question" was whether it would continue, a Japanese delegate said, and "much would depend upon the example of other countries." As the ensuing discussion demonstrated, there were few consistent examples to follow. A Belgian delegate said sex should be explained by parents—"particularly by mothers"—rather than by schools; to a Spanish spokesman, meanwhile, the entire subject "raised controversial points of religious morality and pedagogics" that educators would be wise to avoid. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, some British representatives distanced themselves from their own delegation's proposal. "The first step should be to educate parents to do their own job," a British official told his Swiss counterpart. In an exchange with a Belgian delegate, meanwhile, the same official doubted whether sex education lent itself to international rules or principles in the first place. "Adolescence varies in different countries," the British delegate declared, "and the different countries would have to interpret the question in the light of existing facts."
And so they did. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, Western nation-states took delicate first steps to teach about sex in their schools. They also sought to spread the subject to their overseas colonies and territories via missionaries as well as secular instructors. The content and purpose of these courses was remarkably similar across national borders. Using models and metaphors from the animal world, sex education sought to communicate "the facts of life" while simultaneously discouraging human sexual activity outside of marriage. But the popular response to the subject varied considerably. In southern Europe and Latin America, the Catholic Church took the lead in opposing any school-based sex instruction; in Mexico, most notably, sex education became a key issue in the violent struggle between state and religious authorities. In western Europe and North America, meanwhile, new democratic and labor movements spawned unexpected forms of resistance against sex education. As the playwright and social reformer George Bernard Shaw told a group of sex educators in 1929, advocates for such instruction tended to assume that "what makes for liberty in one thing will make for liberty in all things." But the more "the people at large" could influence government, Shaw cautioned, the more they could inhibit sex education. "Do not think your own particular morality can be imposed on the whole nation," Shaw warned, "and do not dream that such liberality is inherent in Democracy; for that is the greatest mistake you can possibly make."
But sex educators were slow to learn Shaw's lesson. Around the world, they assumed that informed parents would accept the virtues and necessity of sex education; when the educators' hopes were dashed, they demanded that schools teach about sex to save innocent children from parental ignorance. The subject took root most readily in America, which European educators would later revile for its conservative or "Puritan" views on sex. But the United States invested in public education earlier—and to a greater degree—than most other countries did. Whenever a social problem arose, Americans were more inclined to view education as a solvent for it; they also sent more adolescents to secondary schools, which were the most common locus of sexual instruction around the world. Finally, the American pattern of local school control required educators to win popular support for sex education; by the same token, the absence of strong national authority in school matters helped sex educators avoid the broadscale controversy that hounded the subject elsewhere. In the latter half of the twentieth century, conservative critics would swarm American school districts and severely constrain sex education. In the early part of the century, however, America took the lead in the subject—both at home and abroad. "Even in Buenos Aries and Rio de Janeiro mañana becomes to-day when a social-hygiene motion picture is to be exhibited," exulted an official at the American Social Hygiene Association, which sent sex education films around the world. Even when international organizations like the League of Nations rejected its approach, Americans would still find ways to influence how different nations taught about sex.
DAMAGED GOODS
In 1901, the French dramatist Eugène Brieux published a controversial new play, Les Avariés (Damaged Goods), about a married couple with venereal disease. When censors in Paris barred the production of the play, it was staged for the first time in Brussels the following year. Exposing ignorance and hypocrisy about sex, the play concluded with a ringing affirmation of education as an antidote to both. A physician declares that sex education must start early, in schools, lest young people engage in dangerous and immoral behavior. When the father of the "damaged" wife suggests that such instruction will awaken adolescent "curiosities," the physician replies that youth are already interested in sex; the only question is what they will do with it. "We must elevate the soul of the young man by taking these facts out of the realm of mystery and slang," the doctor urges, adding a jibe at the "conspiracy of silence" that enshrouded the subject. "We must make him understand that he is a sort of temple in which is prepared the future of the race."
The same year that Damaged Goods was produced, Brussels also hosted the Second International Congress for Prophylaxis of Syphilis and Venereal Disease. Attendees included an American dermatologist, Prince Morrow, whose European colleagues charged him with establishing an anti-VD organization in the United States. Upon his return Morrow published a translation of a book by French physician and syphilis expert Alfred Fournier, who had helped found his country's Société française de prophylaxie sanitaire et morale. In February 1905, at a medical academy in New York, Morrow started America's own Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis. Dominated by physicians, the international anti-VD movement emphasized medical interventions and legal controls—not education—as a check on the disease. True, the 1902 Brussels congress resolved that schoolchildren should receive "information" about VD. Yet nobody seemed to comment on this brief and unelaborated plea; nor did the congress suggest any specific measures to implement it. Attention focused instead on the convention's recommendations that hospitals provide free treatment for VD—and that governments slap penalties on people who knowingly infected others with it.
THE UNITED STATES: SEX EDUCATION, LOCAL AND NATIONAL
By contrast, Morrow's spin-off organization in the United States focused on education about sex—especially in public schools—as well as on efforts to regulate it. So did dozens of other new groups that sprouted simultaneously across the American landscape in the first decade of the twentieth century. By 1910, an umbrella organization called the American Federation for Sex Hygiene counted twenty-seven different societies with six thousand members; three years after that, it would merge with another group to form the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA). Like its counterparts in Europe, the ASHA was dedicated to eradicating venereal disease and prostitution. But it emphasized education as a route to reform; unless young minds thought differently, the ASHA insisted, their behavior would remain the same. "After a great many years of trying this and that, we finally recognized that the whole situation will never be improved until there is a change in the attitude of the people, about sex," an ASHA official told a teachers' conference in 1922. "We cannot do much with the adults. The hope lies in the development of the next generation." Anti-VD campaigners around the world peppered their reports and speeches with similar statements; indeed, they occasionally borrowed such rhetoric from American sources. But education was a minor key in the global chorus against venereal disease, which remained firmly focused on legal and medical interventions. The exception was America, as a British visitor noted in 1920. In Europe, she wrote, "comparatively little" sex education took place in schools; in the United States, by contrast, "much has been done."
That year, a survey returned by over six thousand American high schools confirmed that 40 percent provided "sex instruction of some sort." Nearly half of those schools reported teaching about sex as part of "courses already in the curriculum"; the most common venue was biology, followed by "physiology and hygiene" and "social sciences." The rest of the schools providing sex education gave what the survey described as "emergency" instruction via lectures, exhibits, and pamphlets. Some school districts hired physicians or other special speakers to address student assemblies, which were almost always segregated by gender. Others simply relied on the leaflets produced by the ASHA and other private organizations, which likewise tailored their wares to the different sexes. (The most popular ASHA pamphlet for boys was called Keeping Fit, while its female counter part was titled Healthy Happy Womanhood.) Noting the lack of a central national authority in US education, one observer marveled that "sex instruction has developed here and there without regard to locality." Paradoxically, it seemed, the highly decentralized American school system was generating an informal national curriculum about sex.
But it was hardly a coincidence. As historians of American education have shown, private foundations and university professors joined hands with state authorities to construct a school system that was simultaneously local and national. Ceding a wide set of decisions to communities, they generated popular support for policies as well as standardization across them. In the case of sex education, early support from the Rockefeller Foundation—much of it veiled from the general public—fostered a degree of uniformity across districts and schools. Of $177,000 donated to the ASHA in 1918, a whopping $145,000 came from the Rockefellers. A devout believer in sex education, John D. Rockefeller Jr. also made personal—and mostly secret—contributions to local districts to promote it. In 1912, for example, he surreptitiously paid for a well-known lecturer to give eighteen talks about sex to teachers on New York's Lower East Side. As Rockefeller told the district's renowned superintendent, Julia Richman, he hoped the talks would help teachers "break down the barrier of mistaken modesty which has so long prevented the proper discussion of this most important subject." But if Richman was asked who sponsored the lectures, Rockefeller advised, she should dodge the question. "You could say that a small group of persons interested in the subject had asked you to see whether anything could be done," he suggested.
Rockefeller's interest in sex education reflected his concerns about "the frightful ravages of venereal disease," as he told an associate in 1910. That same year he had served as foreman of a special grand jury investigating the so-called white slave trade in New York City. Despite muckraking newspaper exposés of a widespread prostitution ring, the investigation failed to uncover any such syndicate. But it did reinforce Rockefeller's worries about sexually transmitted diseases and—especially—about public panic and misinformation on such subjects; hence, the need for sex education, which would replace lurid media accounts with sober scientific knowledge. Rockefeller helped fund the 1913 Broadway premiere of Damaged Goods, which he praised for its matter-of-fact approach to a topic previously shrouded in ignorance and shame. He also sponsored several lengthy surveys of prostitution in the United States and Europe, contrasting their dispassionate, objective style to the tacky tabloids and scandal sheets of the day. Later in the century, the Rockefeller Foundation would join other big American donors—especially the Ford Foundation—in promoting sex education overseas. Yet during the early "experimental stage" of sex education, as one of his lieutenants called it, Rockefeller resolved to establish "a strong, constructive program in our own country" rather than in others. The key was to enlist experts to work quietly with local public school leaders like Richman—and without arousing too much interest or opposition from an easily swayed public.
Meanwhile, the federal government also played an important part in promoting American sex instruction during these years. Because the United States has lacked a department of education for most of its history, other federal agencies have often stepped into the breach to assist schools at moments of stress or crisis. The first such crisis for sex education arrived with America's entry into World War I, when reports of rampant VD among enlistees and soldiers triggered a national panic. Congress responded by establishing the Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board, composed of the secretaries of the treasury, war, and navy departments along with representatives of the United States Public Health Service and the Army and Navy Medical Corps. Its budget included $100,000 per year for colleges and universities to develop "more effective medical measures" to control VD. But three times that amount was allotted to the universities to design "more effective educational measures" to prevent the spread of the disease. During its three years of operation, the board helped establish new departments of hygiene at thirty-nine colleges, universities, and normal schools; beneficiaries included elite private institutions like Harvard and Reed, large state universities such as the University of North Carolina, and three historically black colleges. The board also funded sex education films, which soon became a staple of urban high school classrooms. In 1925, for example, forty thousand New York City students watched sixty-one separate screenings of The Science of Life, which was narrated by a guest lecturer from the US Public Health Service.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Too Hot to Handle by Jonathan Zimmerman. Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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