I wrote this book while serving as chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Professions at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. There’s simply no way I could have completed it without the help and support of my terrific colleagues and staff. Special thanks to Lucy Frazier, Jessica Cole, Letizia Larosa, and Erinn Bernstein, who kept the department running when I flew off to an archive or speaking engagement. Thanks, too, to the intrepid graduate students who have served as my teaching assistants during these years: Janet Bordelon, Christian Bracho, Ben Davidson, Cody Ewert, Noah Kippley-Ogman, Dominique Jean-Louis, Lauren Lefty, Maia Merin, Naomi Moland, Amy Scallon, Rachel Wahl, and Ashley White. I’m also grateful to the leaders of the Steinhardt School, especially Dean Mary Brabeck. Mary made Steinhardt the best place to think, teach, and write about education in the United States. I wish her all the best in her post-dean endeavors.
Clara Platter first suggested this book to me, and Brigitta van Rheinberg brought it to Princeton University Press. I owe the title to my sister-in-law, Sharon Weinberg, who reads more—and more carefully—than anyone I know. Thanks, too, to friends and colleagues who read parts of the book or invited me to share them with audiences: Mary Ann Dzuback, Dagmar Herzog, Richard Hull, Peter Kallaway, Dan Segal, and David Spandorfer. I’m grateful to the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library for a grant to conduct research in its superb collections. Finally, medase (thanks) to my incomparably kind hosts at NYU’s campus in Accra, Ghana, which has provided a home-away-from-home for several summers as well as a terrific place to try out the ideas in this book.
For the past eighteen years, I have been commuting between New York and my home in suburban Philadelphia. This placed extraordinary burdens on Susan Coffin in caring for our two beautiful daughters, Sarah and Rebecca. They’re grown up now, and building their own lives, so we’re embarking on a new chapter. I feel incredibly fortunate that I get to write it with Susan, who remains the anchor of my world.
This book is dedicated to my mother, Margot Lurie Zimmerman, who spent her career in family planning and sex education. As I grew up, she imbued me with the standard liberal assumption that the United States was somehow “behind” more “progressive” countries—particularly those in Western Europe—when it comes to sex education. But the United States actually pioneered the subject, as the ensuing pages will show. Then Europeans created a different type of sex education; one focused less on public consequences and dangers than on individual rights and pleasures. This challenges another liberal storyline from my youth, in which Americans emphasize individual freedoms while Europeans attend to the collective good. In sex education, it was precisely the opposite. Nobody was “ahead” or “behind” in this game; instead, different countries came to it with contrasting goals, expectations, and ideas.
I hope my mother won’t mind that some of the ideas in this book depart from her own. The most important thing she taught me was that our beliefs about sex, love, and family matter. Obviously, that’s one lesson I’ve never forgotten. Enjoy the book, Mom. It’s yours.