A Family of Man?
SEX EDUCATION IN A COLD WAR WORLD, 1940–64
In 1950, the American Social Hygiene Association published a florid tribute to a long-deceased French nobleman who had become a United States folk hero. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831, he recognized “our national genius for organization as expressed in the banding together of private citizens,” noted the Journal of Social Hygiene (JSH), the ASHA’s monthly periodical. To Tocqueville, voluntary associations represented the key to American development—and, even more, to American democracy. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations,” he wrote, in a passage the JSH quoted. “In aristocratic societies men do not need to combine in order to act…. Among democratic nations, on the contrary, all the citizens are independent and feeble [and] fall into a state of incapacity, if they do not learn voluntarily to help each other.” Molding like-minded citizens into a potent political force, organizations like the ASHA had won sex education in most American schools. But most of all, the JSH argued, they underscored what was distinctive about America.1
The following year, ironically, the ASHA called upon other nations to follow America’s supposedly unique example. Addressing the International Union Against the Venereal Diseases (IUAVD), the ASHA’s new Committee on International Relations and Activities acknowledged the “great differences” between the various countries represented in the union. But all of them faced problems of “home and family life,” which were the “root cause” of “sexual promiscuity”—and, by corollary, of sexually transmitted diseases. “In looking beyond the differences in cultural patterns, we find more and more similarities,” the ASHA declared. “A man belongs to the human race, first, and he seeks … membership in a family.” Thanks to its historic tradition of citizen engagement and organization, the United States had taken the lead in “promoting education for wholesome and strong family life,” the ASHA noted. Now it was time for other countries to do the same, by starting their own civic organizations to spread the gospel of sex education. Here the ASHA could be of special assistance, sharing its deep experience and expertise in pressing for sex-related instruction. In time, another ASHA spokesman predicted, people everywhere would realize “not only benefits to be gained for themselves in their own countries, but for humanity the world round” in sex education.2
In some ways, these appeals echoed patterns that had marked sex education since the early 1900s. The subject remained dominated by the United States, which stressed education—not medicine or law—as a solution to the global scourge of venereal disease. As the horrors of World War II yielded to the grim stalemate of the Cold War, however, Americans added two new elements. The first was an emphasis on family relationships; initially in the United States and then around the world, sex education became more commonly known as “family life education.” As Alexis de Tocqueville might have predicted, Americans also promoted their archetypal political mechanism—the voluntary association—as a route to winning the subject in schools. Standing between the individual and the state, such organizations allegedly distinguished democracies like the United States from their Communist foes. By starting advocacy groups for sex education overseas, Americans were not simply protecting the world from venereal disease; they were also shielding it from totalitarian dictatorship, or so they thought. Most of all, sex educators said, they were defending the modern family from a host of internal and external threats. As the bedrock of civilized society, the family was also a bulwark against Communism. Indeed, its most devout believers said, sex education would help defeat the Communist menace and unite a polarized world into the “Family of Man.”
As always, the day-to-day practice of sex education fell short of these lofty ideals. In the United States and Europe, the same democratic qualities that sex educators celebrated often constrained sex education itself. When “the people” spoke on the subject, they were as likely to oppose it as to support it. To some critics, the entire subject violated their democratic rights—as citizens, parents, and religious worshippers. In the so-called developing world, meanwhile, sex education was denounced as a Western or even an American import; despite their efforts to inspire “native” or “indigenous” organizations on its behalf, Americans could never quite shake the impression that they—not the natives—were the engines of sex education. Finally, Communist-bloc countries blasted the subject as a bourgeois affectation that was superfluous—or, even, subversive—in their own societies. Communist regimes began to soften on sex education during the political “thaw” of the early 1960s, when a few brave educators introduced pilot programs in the subject. But the only place where it came close to flourishing was Sweden, a quasi-socialist country that became the first nation-state to require sex education in its schools. It also pioneered a new brand of instruction, with different goals and values, which would eventually challenge America’s global hegemony over sex education.
REPRISE: WAR AND VD
Like World War I before it, World War II sparked new demands for sex education around the world. The key factor, as before, was venereal disease. National conscription highlighted the large number of men who were afflicted, while international military assignments multiplied their opportunities to infect others. In 1942, for the first time, the United Kingdom transferred responsibility for sex education from the British Social Hygiene Council—a voluntary organization that began during the prior world war—to the state-run Central Council for Health Education. The following year, the government issued its first official decree on the subject. “The circumstances of wartime … are liable to break down restraints,” the UK Board of Education warned. So it was the job of schools to restore them, via sex education. The board balked at providing “definite methods of instruction or approach,” preferring to leave such decisions to local authorities. Some schools would choose to teach the subject as part of biology, while others folded it into their lessons on history, literature, religion, or domestic science. In 1945, as the war came to an end, the United Kingdom’s leading sex educator proclaimed that the country had turned a corner. “It is clear that there has been in recent years a radical and widespread change of public opinion,” Cyril Bibby exulted. “Probably there will remain with us for many years a few frightened adults who will continue to foster the culture of ignorance; but an increasingly large section of the population is allowing the myths of the gooseberry bush and the stork to fade into oblivion.”3
In Canada, likewise, reports of a spike in VD—and memories of the previous world conflict—triggered new sex education efforts. “The last war ushered in jazz, women smokers, disregard for authority … popular profanity and general looseness of behaviour,” a Toronto high school journalist wrote in 1940, warning against “a similar decline” on the home front as well as among troops overseas. Four years later a nurses’ bulletin blasted the “prevailing hedonism of the day,” which gave birth to a “rise in individualism” as well as an increase in venereal disease. The year after that, in 1945, the Ontario Department of Education published its first guide for teachers in addressing the subject. By 1947, when the International Union against the Venereal Diseases passed a resolution in favor of sex education, dozens of nations had enlisted schools in the anti-VD effort. In some countries, like Finland and Romania, ministries of education promulgated new policies and curricula; in others, like Norway and France, citizen groups took the lead. A panel commissioned by the French government in 1947 reported that “no aspect of education is more neglected than sex education”; even in science classes, one observer quipped, “the study of the human body stops in the middle, leaving a great hole between the thighs and below the stomach.” Like their British counterparts, however, French officials preferred to leave the matter to local schools—and to local citizens—rather than dictating policy from above.4
Just as they did during World War I, finally, federal officials in the United States sought to expand sex education in order to stem sexually transmitted disease. The US Office of Education enlisted prominent sex educator Lester Kirkendall, who visited thirty-six states to promote educational programs aimed at reducing the “wartime venereal disease rate.” But US commissioner of education John W. Studebaker remained “very fearful of political repercussions,” as Kirkendall later recalled, carefully reviewing Kirkendall’s correspondence with state superintendents and elected leaders. Studebaker also balked at publishing the proceedings of a 1944 sex education conference at the federal Office of Education, where Kirkendall pleaded with assembled experts to move sex education beyond disease control and into the realm of “human relations,” especially familial ones. Kirkendall was himself a product of the disease-centered model, worrying endlessly as a boy that his “solitary sinning”—masturbation—would lead to shyness, mental illness, and an early grave; later, he fretted about contracting VD. But his experiences as a high school teacher and professor persuaded Kirkendall that sex education should substitute a “positive” model of human relations for the “negative” one of disease prevention. When the war ended and the Office of Education discontinued his position, he also became convinced that “non-governmental agencies”—not the state—held the key to transforming the subject. Working in their own local communities, human beings would reorient sex education around face-to-face interaction and communication. Then they would spread out over the nation and the world, Kirkendall predicted, unleashing a true revolution in human thought and behavior.5
GOING GLOBAL
But that revolution would require new international relationships, dedicated to transmitting these ideas around the globe. As the United States assumed greater powers and responsibilities on the world stage, American sex educators turned their gaze overseas. The key agency was again the American Social Hygiene Association, which established an “emergency committee” in 1946 to provide services to war-torn countries marked by “moral looseness and low standards”—and, especially, by rising VD rates. The following year, ASHA officials announced a more permanent international presence. “The Association, with its wide experience [in] an economically and socially stable country, must be prepared to stay for some years to come,” the ASHA declared. Requests for its assistance “come as frequently from the more fortunate countries,” the ASHA added, “which, like our own, were never invaded by panzer units or kamikaze planes, but which are still fighting a war—a long-range battle against venereal disease and prostitution and other enemies of family life and national strength.” The ASHA also assumed leadership of the Regional Office for the Americas of the IUAVD, pledging to reorient the office around sex education. It became an official liaison to the newly forged United Nations, which was turning its attention to questions of health. Finally, the ASHA announced the extension of its Committee on International Relations and Activities—formed several years earlier—to areas beyond its hemisphere. During the war, one member explained, the committee’s efforts were “naturally limited to the Americas.” Now that the conflict had ceased, however, it could assist every corner of the globe.6
By the following year, the ASHA was already providing information and materials to forty-seven different countries and sixty-one national and international agencies. It also sent staffers on “field visits” to twenty-five different countries, while hosting forty representatives from twenty-one countries at its New York headquarters. To be sure, the ASHA had engaged in international activity earlier in the century, when it sent social-hygiene films to different countries and provided periodic advice to the League of Nations and other organizations. But the postwar era witnessed an entirely different form of overseas American influence, in degree as well as kind. Consider the example of Brazil, which an ASHA officer visited in 1947. He met with state health officials and also with members of Brazil’s fledgling social-hygiene community, who subsequently mailed the ASHA further requests for information and guidance. “Please send a small list of some of your leaflets and little booklets on sex education generally and more especially those dealing with the behaviour of young people of both sexes in their social intercourse,” one Brazilian wrote. “American productions will interest us very much, the Americans being clever in educational methods.” The ASHA received similar requests from media organizations, which were likewise starved for sex-related information. “This type of material is very scarce in our country, and we need it badly, very badly,” one journalist wrote in 1950. It also fielded letters from doctors and educators, who often expressed frustration with the slow pace of change in Latin America. “I should like to start a mass erradication [sic] for fighting syphilis,” wrote one physician, “but the trouble in getting help is so big I believe that it would be easier to start a mass erradication [sic] of our politicians.”7
In response, the ASHA sent thousands of pieces of literature to Brazil. At least some of it was translated into Portuguese; the rest was in English or in Spanish, the most common languages of ASHA international materials. In 1947, for example, Brazilians received ASHA pamphlets on “Suggestions for Organizing a Community Social Hygiene Program” and “Application of Catholic Philosophy to the VD Program”; a decade later, the ASHA provided copies of its leaflets on “Strengthening Family Life Education in Our Schools” and “Suggestions for Preparing Teachers in Education for Personal and Family Living.” ASHA international director Josephine V. Tuller also visited Brazil during her “World Trip” of 1954, which took her to twenty-one countries—in the Near East, Far East, Africa, and South America—in just ninety days. In private, Tuller jokingly called herself an “itinerant peddler”; in each country she visited, she told her hosts about the progress that neighboring countries had made. Most of all, though, she helped them with “community organization”—that is, with “ways and means of gaining public interest and support of an educational program in this field,” as Tuller explained. In many parts of the globe, she noted, state officials lacked the will or the wherewithal—or, sometimes, both—to institute sex education in schools. So voluntary organizations would have to pick up the slack, providing sex education even as they pressed governments to do the same.8
SPREADING THE VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION
The first step was to identify willing partners in host countries. Like Brazil, some nations already had nascent sex education or family planning organizations; in others, the ASHA worked with church-based groups or with parent-teacher associations, which one ASHA visitor to Mexico described as “the opening wedge” into government schools. From its New York headquarters, the ASHA sent letters and telegrams advising local organizations on how to proceed, or it might send Josephine Tuller or another representative to work directly with them. Privately, however, Americans wondered whether their hosts possessed the skill and initiative to organize on their own. “The South Americans, on the whole, are less trustworthy than Europeans, and their development and culture is slower,” complained one ASHA official, after visiting several Latin American nations. “A successful program … would require careful consideration [of] the lethargy of the people. Volunteer agencies in this area seem to be weaker than the rest of the field.” In a 1945 memo marked “confidential,” likewise, an ASHA field worker in Puerto Rico worried that the territory’s “tropical climate” inhibited “group planning and participation.” But he concluded on a positive chord, noting slow but important changes in the “natives”’ behavior. “More and more they are coming to think of themselves as Americans, and have quite a natural desire to show that they, too, can accomplish some of the things that we have done,” he wrote. “They have their Rotary Clubs with meetings conducted in English, their Lions Clubs with meetings conducted in Spanish, and other typically American organizations.”9
In areas that the United States occupied after World War II, meanwhile, ASHA representatives worked closely with American military officials as well as with local citizens to establish new sex education organizations. In “pre-Hitler” Germany, one ASHA official wrote, the German Society for Combating Venereal Disease was “the strongest in Europe and, next to the ASHA, the strongest in the world.” But as British sex education pioneer Marie Stopes wrote, following a 1949 tour of Germany, Nazi educators had replaced the society’s careful warnings against premarital sex with “immoral teachings” that any woman who bore a child—whether legitimate or not—was “doing a service to the state.” In the wake of the war, moreover, there were three times as many young women as young men; without “scientifically accurate instruction,” girls would be tempted into “irregular associations” with older and married Germans or with soldiers in the Allied occupation forces. Later that year, the German Society for Combating VD reestablished its first postwar chapter, in the American Zone of Berlin; by 1951, a new German Fellowship for Youth and Marriage Guidance boasted chapters in all four occupation zones. Unlike the prewar anti-VD organizations, which had stressed legal measures, the new groups trained their attention squarely on “sexual pedagogic education,” as one German member told the ASHA in 1951. Venereal disease rates in Berlin had already plummeted to historic lows, he noted. Now was the time to shift education toward “the American way,” which would teach children about proper human relations—including dating, marriage, and parenthood—rather than simply warning against improper ones.10
In Japan, likewise, Americans helped to revive older anti-VD groups and to reorient them beyond the question of disease. Occupation officials established a Purity Education Committee in 1947, with an American chairman but a majority-Japanese membership. The committee released a statement the following year, warning that venereal disease “ruins families, their offsprings [sic], and society at large”; if left unchecked, it could “lead the whole race to destruction.” By the early 1950s, Japanese sex educators had replaced this emphasis on VD—and its apocalyptic language of eugenics, now discredited in the West—with American-style paeans to gender relations, family, and community. A December 1948 memorandum from the US Office of the Commanding General provided a checklist for sex education in the schools, including:
Are we giving guidance to both sexes in boy-girl relationships as a contributing factor for a wholesome well-rounded life?
Are we giving guidance in sex education as it is related to building young people for responsible family living?
Do we encourage wholesome coeducation activities in the classroom as well as extra-curricular activities?
Here US officials cited literature provided by the ASHA, which continued to advise the new Japanese government after the Allied occupiers left. It also worked to jump-start the Japanese Society against Venereal Disease, which had fallen moribund during the war. Without a healthy voluntary association pushing for it, Americans warned, sex education would never survive. “It seems to us … that techniques of community organization, as a means of enlisting the support of public opinion, is a fundamental necessity,” Josephine Tuller told a Japanese visitor to the ASHA’s headquarters in 1954. As an American teacher in Japan added, such an organization would help challenge the society’s traditional reticence about sex. Even more critically, it would help the Japanese “learn much more about democracy … than they will from security pacts.”11
THE FAMILY OF MAN
The new emphasis on domestic relations—and on democratic ones—echoed important trends in the United States, where postwar prosperity and suburbanization spawned a new celebration of the family as the key to American character, strength, and security. An official in the E. C. Brown Trust, an Oregon-based organization that produced pioneering sex education films for U.S. schools, captured the shift in a 1956 article. “Sex education is like the elephant in the story of the blind men, each of whom described the whole animal in terms of the particular part he had felt with his hands,” Curtis A. Avery wrote. “But, whereas the descriptions of the elephant varied with perspective, descriptions of sex education vary with time. That is, sex education in 1911 was one thing; another thing in 1939 and still another in 1950.” In Oregon, early twentieth-century educators stressed “the perils of sex, especially with reference to the venereal diseases,” Avery noted. But in 1929 retired physician E. C. Brown left an endowment to the state social hygiene association, to promote “a sound and healthy view” of sex, marriage, and family. The association used the funds to produce Human Growth, which would become the most commonly shown sex education film in the United States—and, eventually, around the world. Like E. C. Brown’s print materials, the movie embodied what Avery called the three central principles of modern sex education. It dispensed “social and psychological” facts about sex, not just physiological ones; it stressed “family climate and child rearing practices”; and it connected sex to “all other aspects of human life and human relationships.”12
So it would also help steel Americans to shoulder their new international duties, sex educators added. “Never perhaps in our memory is a straight look at life, a belief in humanity, and a faith for living more essential than today,” wrote Missouri sex educator Helen Manley, who served as an adviser to American occupation authorities in Japan. “Our hope for permanent peace is being constantly clouded by our fear of war.” But America was also under threat from within, Manley claimed, noting recent increases in divorce and out-of-wedlock births. “All homes are not worthy of emulation, and some children have no family life,” she cautioned. “The school has a distinct obligation in supplementing the home or substituting for it in such cases.” For the past century, another educator added, American schools had been doing just that. “It is an ironical fact,” he added, “that the school after audaciously taking over so many functions of the family now is beginning to provide instruction on how to conduct family life itself.” Nothing less than the fate of the nation—and of the world—lay in the balance. World peace demanded a strong America; a strong America required stable families; stable families needed sex education; so sex education was the key to world peace. “The gap between ‘family strength’ and ‘world strength’ seems at first glance too wide to bridge, even in a slogan,” the ASHA editorialized in 1959. “But the gap must be bridged…. The ASHA’s slogan, ‘The American Home, the American Hope,’ may well become ‘The World Home, the World Hope.’”13
Most of all, Americans urged other countries to rename “sex education” with new euphemisms: social hygiene, human relations, character education, marriage and family education, or—most commonly—family life education (FLE). Around the globe, nascent or revived sex education organizations followed suit. In the same statement where it called for “sex instruction in the schools,” a Canadian health group resolved that “the term ‘sex’ in the name of the school program be avoided”; better to use “more widely accepted names” such as health education, family relations, or family life education. No matter where they taught, sex educators discovered that “centering the teaching on the child and family rather than on the sex organs would also help to take the curse off it,” as an observer wrote from Norway, which sent an educator to the United States to study FLE. So did Pakistan, where a spokesman noted that Americans had pioneered one euphemism for sex education in the early twentieth century—social hygiene—and replaced it with another, FLE. “The term ‘Sex-Education’ seems to me to offend some people here,” a frustrated family planning official wrote from Hong Kong in 1955, “and I am most anxious to take this opportunity to have them correctly informed, and their complex or prudishness dispelled.” The first step, Americans advised, was to change the name of the course to emphasize family relations; over time, more families would come to embrace it.14
A DREAM DEFERRED
In many parts of the world, however, sex education stalled. Even in the United States, many students received only minimal sex instruction—or none at all—in the public schools. The problem was not solved by calling sex education Family Life Education, which often allowed nervous school officials to avoid the thorny topic of how families were actually made. “Presumably liberal and enlightened educators recommended temporarily de-emphasizing sex in suggested courses in order to get them approved by allegedly reactionary and unenlightened administrators, parents, and citizens at large,” wrote American sex educators Robert and Frances Harper in 1957, reviewing the previous decade of development. “Sex, it was argued, was the kiss of death…. Play up budgets, household management, child care, in-law problems, and how to shop wisely.” After a few years, the argument went, sex could be added without controversy. But sex educators were still waiting. “The years have passed,” the Harpers quipped. “Family life education has become a relatively common commodity in schools and colleges. But where, pray tell, are the clear and forthright voices on sex?” Some educators were simply “prudes” or “Puritans,” the “‘neo-Victorian’ rejectors [sic] of sex as a fit topic for discussion”; others were “rationalizers,” the “emotional phonies” who said the public would never stand for it. The Harpers preferred the prudes, who were at least honest about their Puritan predilections. But “the rationalizers are at heart prudes,” the Harpers concluded, “who lack the courage to profess their prudery.”15
Outside of the United States, likewise, the new emphasis on family did little to quell popular opposition to sex education. Part of the problem lay in the rhetorical overlap between “family life education” and “family planning”—that is, between sex education for youth and contraceptive services for adults. The question was sharply debated at postwar international meetings of family-planning advocates, where Americans—led by birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger—argued for avoiding the entire subject of sexual instruction in schools; although she supported such instruction herself, Sanger worried that it would embroil population-control efforts in unneeded controversy. Sanger was opposed by representatives from Sweden and Holland, who argued that family planning would never succeed without school-based sex education. “Even the most material problems in organizing birth control can be solved only in the trail of a pathmaking sex education,” a Dutch delegate argued, “that makes mankind conscious of sexuality, as a thing of special importance apart from reproduction.” But the Americans won the battle, insuring that the International Planned Parenthood Federation skirted sex education until the 1960s. Meanwhile, at the IUAVD, delegates from France—where a 1920 law still barred dissemination of birth control information—fought to block any mention of family planning from the group’s new sex education initiatives. Yet in the developing world, especially, “family life education” and “family planning” were often seen as one and the same. “It would be dangerous to associate birth control methods with this project in social hygiene,” wrote an American in Costa Rica, where Catholic critics accused FLE of teaching family planning. “Let’s not wave the red flag in front of the Roman Bull.”16
Most of all, though, critics around the world charged that family life education was too American; despite its rhetoric of international values and cooperation, it bore the imprint and biases of the place it was born. Observers in France blasted school-based sex instruction—no matter what it was called—as “an American importation”; in the Virgin Islands, meanwhile, several social workers charged that a new ASHA-minted “personal and family living” curriculum aimed to “impose a different culture” on the islands, even though they were territories of the United States. In Latin America, finally, allies warned American sex educators that “anti-US feeling” would doom the subject if its “Yanqi” flavor were too apparent. “The impetus, or the initiating of the program must come from within the country itself,” wrote the ASHA’s Josephine Tuller, after consulting with a sex educator in Brazil. “Ours should be a ‘hands-off’ policy, unless certain specific services are requested.” The trick was to help build up local organizations so that sex education always seemed to come from indigenous sources, as Tuller told the head of the IUAVD. “The ideal approach … would be built around strong national organizations which have been spontaneously developed in each country,” Tuller wrote. “However, I think the Union can … point out the need of a voluntary organization and give help [in] techniques of developing such a voluntary organization. In that way, we are not superimposing ourselves and our work would not be initiated from the international angle first.”17
Try as they might, though, Americans could not escape the impression that sex education had been initiated—and imposed—by them. Overseas critics often linked it to rock and roll music and other commercial forms of American popular culture, which were allegedly corrupting the globe with sexual filth. Ironically, Americans promoted sex education as an antidote to obscene films, music, and comic books; in 1955, for example, the US Senate’s subcommittee on juvenile delinquency demanded “better sex education for teenagers” to challenge the “deleterious effect” of US-made pornography and highly sexualized literature. Outside of the United States, however, sex education was condemned as an extension of precisely the trends it purported to interdict. As one Ceylonese critic told the ASHA, the family in his own country “remains strong despite Western influence.” Why risk harming it, he asked, with another Western import? Such attacks multiplied with the publication of reports by Indiana entomologist Alfred Kinsey, whose data on widespread extramarital sexual relations in the United States made headlines around the world. In yet another irony, Kinsey himself was a skeptic about school-based sexual instruction; echoing Sigmund Freud’s late writings, he doubted whether “factual information” on sex could correct for warped attitudes dating to infancy and early childhood. To outside critics, however, the Kinsey reports simply confirmed the filthy state of American sexual culture—including American sex education. As one anti-sex-education minister told a 1953 youth rally in Australia, every teen “had to choose between the Christian and the Kinsey view of life”; likewise, Italians cited Kinsey as another reason why their own schools should not follow the “degraded” example of the United States. “Kinsey,” a radio commentator in East Germany surmised, “has revealed the moral bankruptcy of American life.”18
SEEING RED: SEX EDUCATION AND COMMUNISM
Predictably enough, as the final comment illustrates, the most vocal and bitter critics of American- or Western-style sex education often came from the Communist East. To the United States and its Cold War allies, sex education promised to “convert the jangle of warring races and nationalities into the ‘Family of Man’ and the ‘Household of God,’” as a Canadian enthusiast wrote in 1945. But to America’s Communist foes, the very need for sex education in the West underscored the essential depravity of capitalist societies. Here authorities often cited interwar Soviet educators such as Anton Makarenko, who warned that sexual knowledge and discussion would divert youth away from their revolutionary duty. Even in Italy, where Communists made significant electoral inroads in the 1950s, party officials invoked Makarenko—and joined hands with Catholic conservatives—to block any mention of sex in schools. In the USSR and its Eastern European satellites, meanwhile, educators blasted Western popular culture alongside Western sex education. Soviet authorities reserved special disdain for American rock-and-roll dances like “The Twist,” which Russian youth had begun to imitate; alarmed officials even launched a campaign to revive traditional folk dance, which would allegedly stave off the “bourgeois amorality” of the West. In schools, finally, most teachers continued the venerable Soviet doctrine on sex education: least said, soonest mended. Indeed, officials pointed to sex education as the cause—not just the result—of sexual depravity and familial instability in the West. In Denmark, one Soviet author claimed, children “learn everything at a young age”—and adults experienced one of the highest divorce rates on earth.19
Yet the growing youth embrace of Western popular culture also contributed to a sex education “thaw” in the early 1960s, when Communist countries began to soften their opposition to the subject. Noting the rise of venereal disease as well as divorce in East Germany, authorities blamed “imperialist psychological propaganda” from capitalist countries—including film, music, and comic books—that “lead young people towards decadent irresponsibility.” So Communist nations would have to institute their own form of sex education in schools to repel not only sexually transmitted infections but also “the corrupt influence of the West.” In the Soviet Union, likewise, reports of youth promiscuity spawned new demands for sex instruction. In 1963, for example, a medical journal demanded that schools address the subject after a fifteen-year-old girl got drunk and pregnant at an event sponsored by the Young Pioneers—the same organization that was dedicated to protecting youth morality in the USSR! The issue sparked several loud public debates, which themselves demonstrated a new openness to sexual knowledge and information. “There are no forbidden subjects! Nothing is shameful or secret!” one critic complained in 1964, condemning sex education; to another Soviet opponent, the entire subject was “pornographic nonsense” aimed at the “seduction of minors.” In Communist China, meanwhile, several highly publicized speeches by president Zhou Enlai—a longtime supporter of sex education—led a few schools to introduce brief lessons about it. But even these small experiments ended during the Cultural Revolution, which silenced any public mention of the subject. In Poland, finally, hardline Marxists joined with Catholic prelates to rebut new calls for sex instruction. In spite of their many differences, one educator quipped, “both were rather puritanical in their attitudes towards sex.”20
Here the Polish educator echoed critiques in the United States and Western Europe, which often used similar adjectives—prim, prudish, and especially puritanical—to mock sex education in the Communist world. Citing the libertine free-love theories of the early Bolshevik era, some right-wing ideologues in the United States charged that sex education was a Soviet plot designed to drown Western resolve in a sea of licentiousness. More commonly, though, Americans attacked the “iron-fisted prudery” of the contemporary USSR and its Warsaw Pact satellites. Despite its “brief flirtation” with free love in the 1920s, one journalist noted in 1964, the Soviet Union had evolved into a “rigidly puritanical society” that squelched almost all public discussion of sex—especially when children were in the room. “Sex education in the schools is virtually non-existent, and at home the subject is never raised voluntarily by parents,” the American reporter wrote. “Little Tanyas and Ivans who ask blunt questions may be told they were purchased in the children’s department at GUM,” he added, referring to a popular Moscow department store. Nor could citizens get much information from published literature about sex, which was rigidly censored; indeed, the reporter quipped, “a seks manual in the Soviet Union is about as hard to find as a Barry Goldwater button in the Kremlin.” The most popular resource on the subject was reportedly a sex education manual produced for American servicemen during World War II. A “coveted war trophy,” the book had been copied by hand and “passed from one initiate to the other like a translation of Henry Miller.” When a female journalist from the United Kingdom told a young Soviet woman that she could walk into any bookshop in the West and purchase sex-related literature, the Russian refused to believe it. “Why, no one would dream of discussing such intimate things,” she declared.21
THE SWEDISH ALTERNATIVE
Of course, many people in the West did not “dream of discussing such intimate things,” either—particularly not in school classrooms. The major exception was Sweden, which in 1956 became the first nation in the world to require sex education in all of its public schools. Swedes had taught the subject intermittently since the early twentieth century, when socialist and feminist groups pressed for “sex hygiene” as a way to promote birth control—and to ease the burden of working mothers. The subject received a boost from the 1935 Royal Population Commission, which used research by prominent social scientists Gunnar and Alva Myrdal to argue that school-based sex instruction would lower birthrates—and improve living conditions—among the poor. Its other key support came from the Riksförbundet för Sexuell Upplysning (RFSU), the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education, founded in 1933 by the journalist and labor activist Elise Ottesen-Jensen. The seventeenth of eighteen children born into a sprawling Norwegian family, she traced her interest in worker and women’s rights to the unplanned pregnancy and suicide of her only younger sibling. She married a Swedish anarcho-syndicalist and moved to Stockholm, where she campaigned for abortion rights and for repeal of a national ban on birth control information. She also pressed for more “honest” and “realistic” sex education, joining Alva Myrdal in attacking a 1944 sex education handbook that denounced all extramarital sexual activity. To Ottesen-Jensen, the manual was overly “moralizing” and “contrary to Swedish culture”; Myrdal complained that it ignored the national tradition of cohabitation before marriage, where Swedish youth “show quite unusual faithfulness in their love.” Myrdal added a jab at the church leaders who stood behind the 1944 handbook. “There has been too much bishop and too little of physician and pedagogue,” she quipped.22
Controversy continued to wrack sex education into the postwar period, pitting Ottesen-Jensen and the RFSU against conservatives in the religious, medical, and teaching communities. Downplaying the population-control goals that had marked its birth, the RFSU began to emphasize sex education as a key to personal happiness, fulfillment, and growth. “The league has no neomalthusian program,” an RFSU official declared in 1955. “Its goal is individual welfare.” Unlike Thomas Robert Malthus, the British scholar who warned against unchecked population growth, Swedish sex education sought to “make people of all ages relieved of their inhibitions and anxieties,” as Ottesen-Jensen explained. The key was to remove the sense of sin and shame that still permeated sexuality, even in a society as proudly “progressive” as Sweden. “Exhaustive and correct sex education at an early age is imperative in order to eliminate ignorance and prejudice, neuroses and sexual disharmonies,” the RFSU editorialized. Even more, it noted, such problems were as common inside marriages as outside of them. “Marriage in et per se does not elevate the moral quality of a sexual relationship,” the RFSU declared. “We cannot acknowledge a sex education which brands all extramarital relations as sinful.” A 1956 revision of the national sex education handbook omitted outright condemnation of sex outside of marriage but continued to recommend “continence during adolescence.” But that was still too “outdated” for the RFSU, which lobbied authorities to eliminate the passage.23
Meanwhile, conservatives rallied to the manual’s defense. “Premature sex education … serves to make our population into sexual idiots,” a Pentecostal paper warned in 1962. Two years later, when the Royal Board of Education appointed a committee to revise the sex education handbook yet again, 140 doctors and teachers quickly assembled a petition urging Sweden to slow down. “The advanced pedagogues who now rule Swedish education have bombarded school children with sexual instruction beyond their years,” the petition charged. “Sexual education has been unnaturally inflated, producing an obsession among adolescents, and it is the duty of the schools to reduce it to its correct proportions.” The issue also caused a rift within the Lutheran Church—the state church of Sweden—when 744 pastors demanded the firing of Carl Boethius, editor of the denomination’s journal and a future director of the RFSU. In a country where 80 percent of engaged couples had sex before marriage and one-third of married mothers conceived before their wedding, Boethius argued, it was “pointless” for the church to oppose all extramarital relations; in response, his Lutheran critics asked whether he would countenance theft if most people engaged in that, too. But time—and public sentiment—was on Boethius’s side. The country’s largest student organization condemned “propaganda for premarital abstinence,” arguing that schools should not “take a position” on such a controversial subject. Later that year, the newly revised Swedish sex education handbook agreed. The 1964 edition omitted its old warning against extramarital relations, replacing it with a tepid comment that “sexual norms are necessary, but they may vary from place to place and time to time.”24
Meanwhile, Elise Ottesen-Jensen and the RFSU were spreading these messages around the world. Starting in the late 1940s, Ottesen-Jensen made dozens of trips to other countries to promote sex education; in Sweden, meanwhile, RFSU officials received hundreds of foreign visitors. Wherever she went, Ottesen-Jensen stressed that she was “presenting the Swedish example to stimulate thinking,” as she told a New Delhi audience in 1959; it was “not as a blueprint for effort elsewhere,” she added, “since public opinion everywhere was sensitive and varied on this subject.” Yet Swedes often implied that their own brand of sex education should be universal, belying their rhetorical paeans to diversity and variation. Addressing an international conference in London in 1948, Swedish sex educator Gunnar Lycander argued that “sexual need … prevents people from developing into self-controlled, critical beings” and “drives them to hate and cruelty.” The solution lay in sex education, of course, which would help them overcome “fear and guilt” and thereafter live in harmony with each other. Unlike American sex educators, who emphasized family stability as the bedrock of world peace, the Swedes stressed individual freedom and happiness. Their vision drew accolades in many corners of the globe, especially from people dissatisfied with the sexual mores of their own nations. “This is a most narrow and puritanical country,” one correspondent wrote to Ottesen-Jensen from the United Kingdom. “The whole question of Human Love and Human Sex is still in the grip of the Pharisee and the dark ages of barbarism!” But Sweden provided a different example, he added, along with a ray of hope. “I think that your Country must be a grand and truly human Country in all these human sex matters,” the British writer concluded. “You lead the way in HUMANITY—long may you all live.”25
Likewise, sex educators around the world sent florid notes of praise—plus plaintive pleas for assistance—to Ottesen-Jensen and the RFSU. “I thought it may interest you in your advanced state of affairs to hear how we are still struggling on for a minimum of sex instruction in our schools,” an Australian wrote in 1954, noting how a Sydney teacher who tried to introduce the subject was blocked from doing so. Similarly, an American who visited Ottesen-Jensen congratulated Sweden for “developing a much healthier and more rational approach” to sex education than the United States. (“I hope that we will not be too long in catching up,” he added.) Ottesen-Jensen’s proudest moment was probably her 1954 tour of the United States and Mexico, which began with an award ceremony sponsored by the Planned Parenthood Federation at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. It concluded in the same city three weeks later, when she addressed a press conference at the United Nations and met with Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld. In between, Ottesen-Jensen spoke to dozens of educators, journalists, and community organizations, giving different versions of the famous lecture to teenagers—“Anatomy and Physiology of Sex and Reproduction”—that she had delivered in Sweden thousands of times. She also tried to rebut the myth of Swedes as overly prurient or sex obsessed, which was already apparent in letters to the RFSU from young men around the world seeking pornographic material. The point of sex education was not to encourage promiscuity or deprive sex of romance, she reiterated; if that were true, she often joked, “physicians would not be able to love.” To the contrary, it was to “eliminate anxiety” surrounding sex, so that a man could “devote himself completely to another person”—and vice versa.26
But the distinction was lost on overseas critics of Swedish sex education, who multiplied during these same years—and invoked the same myths that Ottesen-Jensen tried to dispel. Here, too, Americans took the lead. In 1955, Time published an article with a provocative title—“Sex in Sweden”—focused largely on sex education in the country. It drew on an informal dinnertime conversation between two of the magazine’s correspondents and Elise Ottesen-Jensen, who later claimed that she was unaware she was being interviewed; nor did she imagine that her off-the-cuff comments would soon appear on the pages of Time. “I tell girls it is all right to sleep with a boy—but first they must be in love,” Ottesen-Jensen was quoted as saying. “Everybody knows that [teenagers] sleep with each other. Their mothers and fathers know it. What use is there of trying to change human nature?” The article concluded with a flippant remark by a nineteen-year-old, who happily admitted that he had “no real morals” when it came to sex. “I would never marry a girl because I had made her pregnant,” he added. “Why should I give up my liberty for the sake of a child?” The piece triggered an angry letter from the Swedish ambassador in the United States to Time publisher Henry Luce, whose aide replied with a vigorous defense of the magazine’s “energetic and accurate reporting.” But it also sparked debate inside Sweden, where conservatives rallied behind the article. “It seems that the sexual radicals do not want to be known by their own fruits,” one right-wing newspaper gloated. “Decade after decade they have preached sexual freedom. Does not one believe that this eventually has consequences?” Ottesen-Jensen’s allies mounted their own attack upon the Time article, blaming its harsh tone on Claire Booth Luce, the publisher’s wife and a convert to Catholicism. “Catholic Time has deceitfully chosen to come to Lutheran Sweden,” one reader wrote.27
In a pattern that would repeat itself over the next half century, meanwhile, observers around the world projected their own beliefs and biases onto Ottesen-Jensen and Swedish sex education writ large. “Sex is running amuck with the human race everywhere these days,” an appalled South African letter writer told Time. “It is the devil’s playground, and I really think the world would be a finer place without it.” To a correspondent in neighboring Norway, meanwhile, the entire episode showed that Scandinavians “are facing the issue squarely”; Americans, by contrast, were “dodging the sex problems of their own youth” and enveloping the subject in needless shame and mystery. In the United States, finally, critics linked Swedes’ sex education—and sexual promiscuity—to the excesses of their “socialist” welfare state, which had allegedly fostered a dreary national ennui and a rising suicide rate. The suicide statistics were a distortion, possibly dating to a speech by outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower at the 1960 Republican National Convention. But so were almost all foreign reports about Swedish sex education, which was neither as libertine nor as pervasive as its enemies and allies imagined. Despite the highly publicized national mandate for sex education, about half of Swedish teachers avoided the subject or ignored it altogether; although the national handbook advised instructors who “feel embarrassed” to “pass the task on” to other colleagues, one observer wrote, “many are too embarrassed to confess their embarrassment.” Meanwhile, surveys revealed that students receiving sex instruction in school knew barely more about the subject than children whose teachers omitted it. Overall, an RFSU official admitted, many Swedish youth remained “naïve, ignorant, and unsophisticated” about sex.28
GIRLS, BOYS, AND SEX
Around the world, the same problems that had stifled the subject in the prewar period continued into the postwar one: religious objections, parental resistance, poor teacher preparation, and so on. Despite national government initiatives to promote sex education in the United Kingdom, for example, only 16 percent of respondents in a 1953 poll said they had received it; the rest “picked up the facts of life at the street corner, in the factory, or even in the marriage bed.” When children did get sex instruction in schools, meanwhile, it often echoed the harsh, hushed tone of previous eras. “Always the tactics were to try to scare you out of it, instead of telling you what it was all about,” said one American, recalling brief but terrifying lectures about the perils of VD and masturbation in the late 1950s. In Australia, where special classroom editions of Shakespeare excised references to sex, schoolboys read a treatise warning that VD would bring “delicate, deformed, or weakly children”—whereas “self-abuse” would injure their own health. “Such boys are constantly weak and tired, and rarely excel at either sport or school work,” the pamphlet noted, describing chronic masturbators. “They certainly never become leaders, because they kill all those things which go to make leaders: namely, self-control, courage, pride, confidence, will-power, and ambition.” Invoking animal metaphors, another legacy of the early twentieth century, such lessons sowed boredom as well as fear in young minds. When a British headmistress delivered a lecture about fish reproduction, concluding with a comment about “how much better the human method was,” her female pupils shrugged. “Who wants to know about fishes?” one recalled. “What we needed to know … was boys and what they wanted to do to you.”29
Other students remembered very clear messages on that point: boys wanted sex, and it was girls’ job to rebut and restrain them. With the new accent on familial relations, few textbooks or teachers openly maintained that women “actively dislike” sex or were “indifferent” to it, as a British physician told Oxford students in the early 1900s. (The rare woman who enjoys sex “will always be a harlot,” he added.) Instead, sex educators acknowledged female sexuality, as part of marriage, and made women responsible for keeping sex inside of it. “A boy may think the girl expects him to continue as long a she lets him,” an American sex education book warned. “Since you cannot be sure your date is under emotional control, it is up to you—boy or girl, to stop while you have control.” But that was always easier for the girl than the boy, the book added, because “his desire does indeed become more intense at a more rapid rate than the girl’s.” A 1959 Japanese textbook—titled, simply, Sex and Chastity—put the matter differently: men have an “active” sex drive, while women have a “passive” one. But neither text left any doubt about where the act should occur: in a marital union, between a husband and a wife. Until they assumed these roles, boys and girls should “learn to direct [their] sex drives in a healthy channel,” the American textbook advised. “Begin by involving yourself in many activities such as active sports,” it added, “leaving you little time to fret and worry about sexual desires and drives.”30
At the same time, ironically, sports coaches and teachers became the most common instructors about sex. Since the early 1900s, educators had recommended athletics and organized sports as an antidote to “primitive sex urges,” as Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell wrote. As more schools provided physical education, however, they increasingly transferred sex instruction from biology and science classes into PE classes. “The very nature of physical education gives the teacher a better chance to become intimately acquainted with her students,” an American educator explained. “She cannot only give the fundamental teaching of reproduction, but can instill higher ideals and attitudes in her students.” Science classes mixed boys and girls together, where they might be “shy in the presence of the opposite sex,” the educator added. Physical education was sex segregated, by contrast, so “the bug-a-boo of mixed classes is done away with.” As more and more high schools grouped students by ability, finally, many children in “nonacademic” tracks did not take a science course at all; but almost all of them took PE, providing another good reason to locate sex education within it. Other sex educators urged schools to teach the subject in new “Marriage” or “Life Adjustment” courses—which became common in the United States and United Kingdom during these years—while others warned against separating it into a special class, which would make it an easy target for hostile parents and media critics. “The understanding and cooperation of all teachers are urgently needed,” the Purity Education committee in U.S.-occupied Japan declared. “Each will make a contribution [to] Purity Education which stands like a Pyramid.”31
PARENTS, TEACHERS, AND SEX EDUCATION
In practice, though, teaching sex education “across the curriculum” allowed teachers of any given discipline to avoid it. Nor did that strategy insulate them from angry parents, who continued to claim that sex education would promote the same vices it was designed to inhibit. In India, which made ginger forays into sex education in the 1950s, one opponent said the subject would “arouse curiosity where none existed.” Indeed, another Indian critic added, plenty of citizens in the West believed the same thing. “It is not in our country alone, that misgivings on sex education exist; the other advanced countries too face similar setbacks,” he emphasized. In the United Kingdom, India’s former colonial master, a fourteen-year-old unwed mother made national headlines in 1949 when she blamed her pregnancy on the sex education she had received in school. That same year, an angry mother collected over a thousand petition signatures against sex education after her thirteen-year-old daughter came home from school and refused the egg that had been prepared for her; after her teacher told her how eggs were made, she said, she lost her appetite for them. Her mother searched the girl’s possessions and discovered graphic drawings copied from sex lessons at school; if such figures were found in her own handbag, the mother noted, she would be called a “dirty woman.” She then began to talk to other mothers in the community, who reported that their daughters were discussing “nothing but sex, sex, sex.” The reason wasn’t hard to find: they were learning about it in school.32
Elsewhere, too, parents savaged sex education as an attack on their own prerogatives. “It is our flesh and blood you are gambling with when you put sex instruction in the public schools,” an American mother thundered, in testimony before the Los Angeles Board of Education, “and we feel it is the parents’ duty, let alone their right, to instruct their children in accordance with their own beliefs.” In New York, likewise, a bishop preaching at St. Patrick’s Cathedral denounced schools for showing children the ASHA film, Human Growth, which he described as “an invasion of the rights of the parents.” Catholic sex education critics around the world quoted Pope Pius XI’s 1929 encyclical against sex education, which was reaffirmed by Pope Pius XII in 1951. A Catholic physician in Italy condemned sex education as “fit only for Bolshevik schools”; when a women’s federation in Jamaica endorsed sex education and family planning, the island’s bishop called on Catholic women to withdraw from the organization; Scottish bishops released a statement in 1944 expressing “instinctive distrust of all sex instruction and sex teaching”; and nearly two decades later, in 1962, a well-known London priest and author denounced the British Broadcasting Corporation for putting a sex education segment on the radio. As the priest acknowledged, two of five new Catholic wives in the United Kingdom were pregnant at their weddings. But the solution to that problem lay in religious faith rather than in sex education, which “did not admit the supernatural as a means to control the natural,” he concluded.33
Many teachers were only too happy to cede the subject to others. “Let the parents explain it!” one French teacher told a researcher. “Aren’t they able to?” Often the answer was “no,” of course, which provided a key rationale for sex education in the first place; unless teachers intervened in the family, a prominent American author argued, the “vicious circle” of ignorance would continue. But that was often too much to ask of lowly schoolteachers, who risked losing their jobs—and their meager livelihoods—if they flouted community sentiment on matters of sex. A small-town teacher in Norway was fired in the early 1950s when his brief sex education lesson—from an American textbook—triggered a parental strike. Although he was eventually reinstated, after suing his school board, other teachers could not miss the real lesson of the episode: stay away from sex education, particularly in rural areas. Even in nearby Denmark, which had joined Sweden as an international symbol of liberal sexuality, rural teachers introduced the subject at their peril. “An ideal Sex Education throughout the country has proved to be almost an impossibility due to the many variations in local emotional feelings,” one observer wrote. “In many small villages and rural districts … old-fashioned sexual prejudices are strongest.” In 1961, an American court upheld the dismissal of an English teacher who led a discussion of prostitution and the “pros and cons” of premarital sex. As the court ruled, the teacher failed to point out that adultery—like prostitution—was illegal in his state; he “transcended the bounds of the standards of propriety of the community”; and, most of all, he exceeded the limits of his own professional skill and training:
Sex education is a subject matter for which a teacher should be especially competent to teach. A parent and the school authorities have a right to expect that children are not going to be exposed to comments, discussions, and personal opinions of a teacher on sex who had not been certified to teach such subject in classes which do not relate to such subject…. Only one qualified and so certified by the proper authorities should be allowed to undertake to teach this delicate subject and only in a class expressly for that purpose.34
In fact, almost no teacher during this era—in the United States or anywhere else—was specially prepared or certified to provide sex education. The American court’s demand also ran counter to the popular doctrine of integrating sex education across the curriculum, which would have required every teacher—not just a specialized few—to receive training in the subject. But teachers rarely encountered the topic as part of their professional preparation; the exceptions were mostly preservice teachers in health or physical education, who often took a course from someone scarcely more prepared than they were. “The teachers of teachers are no braver, or any better equipped, than the teachers themselves,” an American sex educator complained, “so there exists a circle which up to this point has resisted all efforts to break it.” High schools typically assigned the subject to a teacher based not on her academic background, but on her personal characteristics; indeed, one British educator wrote, the “best qualification” for teaching about sex was a “normal married life” at home. “Men must be definitely masculine with that quality which used to be called manly, and women must be feminine with that quality which used to be called womanly,” she declared. “It won’t do to shade even slightly in the opposite direction.” Administrators were warned against assigning sex education not just to “confirmed bachelors”—a code word for homosexuals—but also to “immature” younger women and “maladjusted spinsters”: the first group would be too interested in sex and the second one too alienated from it. “Only wholesome persons can be fine sex educators,” an American sociologist underlined. “The ultra-conservative, prudish women of the teaching profession cannot be expected to impart healthy attitudes to our school children when the very word sex makes the teachers blush and giggle, or leaves them ‘shocked.’”35
REPRISE: SEX EDUCATION, VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATIONS, AND DEMOCRACY
Around the world, voluntary organizations took it upon themselves to compensate for what teachers would not—or could not—do. Following the example of Sweden’s RFSU, which offered periodic lectures and summer courses, some organizations worked with teachers to promote and improve sex education. But others went directly into the schools, providing instruction for children and teachers alike. In the United Kingdom, the Alliance of Honour—a purity organization dating to the turn of the twentieth century—sent midwife Annabelle P. Duncan to Scotland, where she visited girls’ high schools to teach about sex. Duncan’s standard short “course” was three classes, spread across an equal number of weeks. Using several filmstrips, Duncan devoted the first two visits to explaining the physiological and psychological changes of adolescence; in the third session, from which other teachers were barred, she fielded anonymous questions from the students. In Ghana, meanwhile, the local Christian Council sent several physicians and other representatives into middle schools in Accra—the capital—to give talks about sex; in 1961, the first year of the pilot project, sixty of seventy-eight middle schools in the region hosted a lecturer. The talks sparked freewheeling discussions, as a sample of student questions reveals:
What should we do with boy friends who pester us to have intercourse?
Why is it not good to have more than one husband?
Is masturbation good?
Can woman conceive without having intercourse with a man?
Since pre-marital intercourse is wrong what should people do if they have the sexual urge?36
But the Christian Council failed to get public schools to take up this curriculum on their own, as council leaders had hoped. First of all, nobody knew who would teach it on such a broad scale; if the council’s syllabus were adopted nationwide, one member admitted, “it would immediately raise questions that existing teachers have not been hitherto trained to teach this subject.” Even more, though, government officials proved decidedly cool to sex education in the schools. “I am not sure that Ghanaian boys and girls passing through secondary schools have any ‘erroneous myths’ about sex,” one education official wrote in a private memo, dismissing the Christian Council’s claim that students needed more information on the subject. “I have personally held the view that the sort of ‘sex education’ being talked about here is only necessary for artificial societies such as we find in Europe and North America. We should be careful of such importations into our natural society.” Even in the West, of course, plenty of people regarded sex education as unnatural and unnecessary, if not actively harmful. Hence sex educators’ reliance upon voluntary organizations, which played a slightly different role than the American Social Hygiene Association—and, many years before, Alexis de Tocqueville—had imagined. Invoking Tocqueville, the ASHA promoted civil-society groups as a way of “maintaining the democratic principle that the voice of the people must be heard,” as one spokesman wrote. But they were also a way to dodge or evade the people’s voice, if it was sounding off against sex education.37
Some governments preferred it that way, because voluntary organizations could insulate them from popular fire. “It was more convenient for the Authorities to have a separate non-governmental organization specializing in sex education, than to involve themselves in this activity,” one Polish sex education advocate noted. Indeed, Catholic critics trained more of their ire on his own organization than they did on state educational officials. In Scotland, similarly, the Education Department partially funded Annabelle Duncan’s school lectures but also tried to keep that fact out of the public eye, refusing to put a government representative on her voluntary council; “in this particular respect,” one official explained, “the Department must walk warily.” Canadian educational officials advised teachers not to send home any material about sex education and even asked students not to make their own notes on the subject in schools; such information could expose schools to public attack and also to scurrilous rumors, officials argued, including a widely circulated story that one district was using a Kinsey report as a textbook. The more democratic a society became, it seemed, the more sex education came under assault. “It can’t be taught in school,” a West German educator stated flatly in 1960, noting stalled efforts to establish the subject in Berlin. “When a progressive teacher attempted to teach sex education, he ran the risk of losing his job.” At least one teacher had already done so.38
The German’s use of the term progressive highlighted a final irony in the story of postwar sex education. Particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, advocates often touted the subject as an exemplar of progressive education. It was centered on the needs and interests of the student, not the teacher; it addressed real-world concerns, not arid academic ones; and, most of all, it prepared young people for life. “Education is not only a question of imparting knowledge,” progressive patron saint John Dewey had written in a passage routinely quoted by sex educators. “More than anything, education is living, experiencing, experimenting.” But in his own life experience, a half-joking British miner quipped, he had learned about sex simply by doing it; so would his children, who “have to find out for themselves.” And in the real world of democratic politics, citizens often balked at school-based sex education. “Even in America, where ‘progressive’ education got its start, sex education is so obviously the most neglected area of instruction that the point hardly needs belaboring,” two American educators complained in 1961. Of course, they quickly added, America was “not alone” in that respect; except for Sweden, other countries were “equally backward” or even more so. “In most of the world,” they conceded, “it is much easier to come by sexual experience than to gain accurate information about sex.” The real questions were whose experience counted, what information they needed, and who would decide the difference.39