Description
The first comprehensive trade history of sex ed in American schools—and an impassioned call to reform sex ed into a powerful tool for reproductive justice and social equality
The U.S. has some of the highest rates of STIs and teen pregnancies in the industrialized world. A comprehensive sex education curriculum—which teaches facts on contraception, prophylactics, consent, and STIs—has been available since the 90s. Yet the majority of states require that sex education stress abstinence, and 22 states do not require sex ed in public schools at all.
In The Fight for Sex Ed, writer, advocate, and historian Margaret Myers shows us how we got here. While the earliest calls for sex ed came from a coalition of religious leaders and doctors at the turn of the century who sought to control the prevalence of STIs, the advent of antibiotics and modern condoms meant that abstinence was no longer good public health policy. The religious right, however, continued to frame it as such, using its impressive machinery to replace scientific facts with conservative Christian values.
Because sex ed is not mandated at the federal level, these battles have played out locally throughout the decades: through rigged school boards, administrative oustings, court cases, unjust firings, scare tactics, and threats. Myers also shows how the religious right has worked to narrow the discourse around sex ed, often dictating the terms of debate almost entirely.
What we teach young people has serious ramifications for reproductive justice, LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality, and public health. Sex education lies at the intersection of these hugely important cultural forces, yet it has been largely invisible. This book illuminates its potential—and its power.
Table of Contents
Preface: Then and Now
CHAPTER 1
Dr. Prince Morrow and the Birth of Sexual Health Advocacy in America
CHAPTER 2
Ella Flagg Young and the First Sex Ed Lectures in American Public Schools
CHAPTER 3
Fit to Fight: Syphilis and WWI
CHAPTER 4
Thomas Parran and “The Next Great Plague to Go”
CHAPTER 5
Ellsworth Buck’s Drive to Educate New York City
CHAPTER 6
World War II
CHAPTER 7
The Birth and Boycott of the Sex Ed Film
CHAPTER 8
Sex Ed and Family Life Education in the 1950s
CHAPTER 9
The First North American Conference on Church and Family
CHAPTER 10
The Birth of SIECUS
CHAPTER 11
The Religious Right Comes for SIECUS
CHAPTER 12
The New Battles of the 1970s
CHAPTER 13
A Decade of Federal Action
CHAPTER 14
Curricula Wars
CHAPTER 15
AIDS
CHAPTER 16
The Rise of Comprehensive Sex Ed
CHAPTER 17
The A-H Definition
CHAPTER 18
Trump, Biden, and Today
AFTERWORD
The Future of Sex Ed
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
