Other sex experts included at the Green Lake conference were Lester Kirkendall, a sexuality educator and later a cofounder of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS); Evelyn Hooker, a psychologist influenced by Kinsey’s research on male homosexuality and whose own work led ultimately to homosexuality being dropped from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; Ruth Proskauer Smith, an abortion rights and family planning advocate; and Mary Steichen Calderone, medical director of the Planned Parenthood Federation (and later the executive director of SIECUS), who had carried on a warm and lengthy correspondence with Kinsey during his lifetime. Working closely with these experts and other thinker-activists, Christian leaders at the conference voted to adopt a statement affirming the church as “a redemptive fellowship—friendly, nonjudgmental, forgiving, accepting.” The church, continued the statement, “must be compassionate, supportive, and empathic. It must re-examine the quality of its own interpersonal relationships. It must seek out and be ready to accept all people into fellowship, whatever they have done.” Along with an appeal to “strengthen homes and families” in both religious faith and sexual teachings, the statement called the church to “re-evaluate attitudes toward marriage and sex, in light of biblical theology and scientific findings” and to “develop a positive Christian ethic on sexual behavior which will be relevant to our culture.”53 Many of the signatories to the statement subsequently committed significant time and energy to writing and speaking about the need for new and creative religious thinking about sexual ethics.
Change was in the air for liberal Protestants, and many other leaders weighed in over the next several years. For instance, Harvey Cox, the liberal Baptist theologian who would earn international fame with his 1965 book The Secular City, squared up against Reinhold Niebuhr on sexual issues in Christianity and Crisis, for an article that was then reprinted for popular consumption in Redbook. Citing Kinsey, Cox noted that American society was mired in hypocrisy that most refused to face, the “cant and flimflam of its sexual folkways.” Cox diverged from Kinsey, though, in calling for a “de-mythologized… sexual ethic,” one that would “reject… any Kinseyan inference that what is being done should determine what ought to be done” while refusing, in turn, to “pander to the cheap attempt to oversimplify the issue” of premarital intercourse. Cox admitted that his solution risked sounding like “evasion,” but he argued emphatically that his nuanced approach could help Christians “outgrow our ridiculous obsession with sex, of which our fixation on chastity and virginity is just the other side of the coin.”54
Shifts were also gradually taking place in liberal religious thinking about homosexuality, long treated as a condition of sin or sickness. W. Norman Pittenger, a theologian and Episcopal clergyman who taught for thirty-three years at New York’s General Theological Seminary, authored his first book on sexuality in 1954, when Kinsey was still alive, titled The Christian View of Sexual Behavior: A Reaction to the Kinsey Report, and went on to author many more. His early response to Kinsey’s studies was relatively conservative—he echoed others’ critiques of the scientist’s biologism, dedicated The Christian View of Sexual Behavior to “all those who in Christian marriage have been made one flesh,” and wrote extensively about sexual sin. Nevertheless, he would later argue for full acceptance by the church of same-sex relationships.55 In books such as Time for Consent: A Christian’s Approach to Homosexuality (1967), Making Sexuality Human (1970), Love and Control in Sexuality (1974), and Gay Lifestyles (1977), Pittenger disavowed much of his earlier writing on sexuality as being “altogether too conventional” and made a robust case for applying identical ethical standards to homosexual and heterosexual erotic behavior.56 His stance was unambiguous: “I am frank to say that I cannot see how the desire of the homosexual for bodily manifestation of his sexual drive is wrong, in and of itself; nor can I see why, once this has been put under human controls, it is wrong for him to act upon it.”57 By the time of his death at age ninety-one in 1997, Pittenger had spent decades supporting various components of the LGBT rights movement, including the Episcopal Church’s LGBT organization, Integrity.58
Countless other religious liberals joined in that process of rethinking sexual ethics from Jewish and Christian points of view beginning in the 1950s. These efforts bore fruit in traditional organizations such as the Young Women’s Christian Association and United Church Women, which plunged into the task of addressing hitherto forbidden sexual topics. In addition, a number of Protestant denominations redoubled their efforts to produce straightforward sex education curricula for children and teens.59 New alliances also emerged, including a host of groups devoted to the religious and civil rights of gays and lesbians and an explicitly pro-choice network of Protestant and Jewish clergy that referred women to safe abortion providers well before Roe v. Wade decriminalized the procedure. Insofar as they continued to advocate committed monogamous relationships, as most religious liberals did, their perspectives hardly seem radical today; by twenty-first-century standards, indeed, they may appear traditional and conservative. But many religious liberals were, in a palpable sense, revolutionary, bearing witness to a new openness and creativity in sexual ethics spurred in no small part by the provocative work and engaged collaboration of Alfred Kinsey.
Certainly, their efforts seemed revolutionary to traditionalist Protestants and Catholics. By no means were all Christians on board with this liberalization; to the contrary, many conservatives viewed it in near apocalyptic terms. As the Cold War continued to cast its long shadow of potential destruction over the nation, the peril of gender roles and sexual norms in turmoil struck many as deeply undermining to American morale, not to mention the moral formation of youth. The cultural influence of liberals was bad enough, but efforts to change the law were profoundly unsettling and would soon meet staunch resistance.
If Kinsey’s reports thrust a new glare on differences among American Christians that were growing ever more stark, it was a glare that hardly dimmed in subsequent years. The next major controversy grew out of the new openness to talking publicly about sex propelled by Kinsey but went much further and deeper in its impact, at both the national and local levels. Nothing was more controversial, it turned out, than how to teach children about sex.
CHAPTER 5
SEX EDUCATION IN THE SIXTIES AND THE SURGING RELIGIOUS RIGHT
THE DECADE AND A HALF following Kinsey’s report on women was a time of rapid changes in American attitudes regarding sex and gender. The trends uncovered by Kinsey only intensified, as the broader public culture grew more tolerant of explicit sexual themes and imagery. Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine debuted in the same year as Kinsey’s female report; at the same time, Hollywood films were becoming more overt in their treatment of sex. The publication of several sexually frank novels made waves, including—finally—the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover. By 1960, the year the first birth control pill was approved by the Food and Drug Administration and sold as Enovid, many college students were openly questioning the strict sexual standards and taboos of their parents, including disapproval of premarital sex. Helen Gurley Brown’s racy best seller Sex and the Single Girl came out in 1962, exuberantly advocating women’s sexual freedom before and outside marriage, and Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking manifesto about unfulfilled homemakers and “the problem that has no name,” The Feminine Mystique, was published the following year. Like the changes preceding them, both works signaled fresh challenges to the standing ideals of femininity and female virtue, embodied in premarital virginity and compliant marital domesticity.1
Meanwhile, liberal Protestant activism on behalf of gay rights (including repeal of sodomy statutes) received increasing attention in both the religious and the secular press. The Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in Jacobellis v. Ohio served to loosen obscenity laws, and in the same year the American Medical Association voted for the first time to recommend that physicians routinely distrib
ute birth control information to their patients. In terms of sex, the United States looked very different in 1964 than it had a decade earlier.
Sex educator Mary Steichen Calderone in her New York office. CECIL BEATON/CONDÉ NAST VIA GETTY IMAGES.
This tidal shift, as many felt it to be at the time, received wide notice in the media, and countless magazine articles appeared that sought to explain to worried audiences what was happening. A Newsweek cover story in 1964 focused on the “Morals Revolution on the U.S. Campus” and explained that “the key to the new morality” was the understanding that “a boy and girl who have established what the campus calls a ‘meaningful relationship’ have the moral right to sleep together.”2 For many, especially American parents, this was shocking stuff.
One important result of the anxiety generated by these changes was a concerted effort to implement wholesome sex education. As educators and professionals across many fields sought ways to address the social problems they perceived to be erupting because of shifting sexual standards, many agreed that schools must play an important role in that effort. Sex education programs proliferated during the mid-1960s, a wave as potent as it was divisive. Attitudes toward them hinged on whether observers believed that school-imparted information would be a help or a hindrance to traditional morality. Although some parents were suspicious of such programs, growing numbers of educational experts believed they were essential to stemming the social evils made possible by changing morals.
One of the most important organizations in the development of sex education programs was the Sex [later Sexuality] Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), founded in 1964 and led for the next eighteen years by Mary Steichen Calderone. Under Calderone’s leadership, SIECUS made enormous inroads in school systems across the country, efforts for which it was both applauded and excoriated. SIECUS was a particular bête noir for conservative Christians who did not believe sex education programs like those produced by SIECUS should be in the public schools. Calderone’s chief adversary in this battle was Billy James Hargis, an intrepid anti-Communist crusader and influential evangelist. The battle between Calderone and Hargis, and the struggle over sex education more broadly, played out in countless local clashes in school districts across the nation. Examining these dynamics helps us see the complicated forces in play at this moment: the alliances among scientists, reformers, and religious progressives that pushed for sexual liberalization, and the backlash from religious conservatives, who increasingly fueled right-wing politics with campaigns against sexual immorality and liberality. The conflict played a formative role in the early shaping of the modern Christian right.
Reactions for and against sex education echoed and intensified the acrimonious feuds fueled by the birth control movement, attempts to control erotic themes in film and literature, and public reports of extramarital sexual behavior in earlier decades. The controversy gave rise in the 1960s and 1970s to fresh waves of resentment toward a seemingly liberalizing culture that made increasing room for sexual behavior deemed unorthodox by conservative Christians. Whatever Christian consensus remained about the immorality of premarital sex was beginning to crumble in this period, and schools were expedient targets of rage. Fear that the United States was falling into corruption and anarchy was potent in the 1960s, and nothing better personified that risk than the sex education of the nation’s children.
ORGANIZED PROGRAMS SEEKING TO EDUCATE young people about sex emerged from the same Progressive Era milieu that nurtured so many other reforms, including birth control. The American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA), founded in 1914, campaigned for sex education as a way of nurturing healthier populations: youth would know how to protect themselves from venereal disease, especially. The ASHA also argued that sex education would produce more wholesome citizens, by helping to overturn the gender and sexual stereotypes that fueled prostitution and unhappiness in marriage. There had been far too much tacit acceptance of male immorality, its supporters believed, and simple decency dictated that men and women alike should be held to the same standards of sexual behavior. Thus early proponents of sex education often linked a program of hygiene to the quest for women’s full equality.
As contraception became more widely available in the 1930s and afterward, leaders and educators from a wide range of fields had to rethink sex ed programs. Social workers like Emily Hartshorne Mudd, who founded a birth control clinic in Philadelphia, were distressed to witness “case after case of marital unhappiness and maladjustment, based often on ignorance, fear and rejection of the whole sexual side of life,” problems frequently revealed when women sought contraceptive guidance.3 Mudd would become a pioneer in marriage counseling, where she had a long and distinguished career. Others focused on the sex education of youth, aiming to prevent marital troubles from occurring in the first place. Sex education during these middle decades continued to be aimed essentially at building and sustaining strong marriages.
Thus many such programs, though they may have appeared daring in their relative willingness to discuss private matters, had a distinctly conservative, moralistic flavor. An example from the San Diego city school system during World War II illustrates the desire to contain and exert control over the frightening changes afoot amid the flood of military personnel into the city. Through “biology, English, home economics, science, social studies, and hygiene (health) classes,” the San Diego curriculum highlighted themes including the “disastrous results that interfere with happiness when an individual ‘bucks’ social conventions. Difficulties commonly involved when marriage is made between differing races, religions and nationalities. Individual’s responsibility to the next generation. Role of both sexes in family life. Family harmony.” Although there was some limited discussion of “petting” and actual sex acts, the program’s deeper concern of shoring up fragile families and uncertain moral standards was unmistakably clear.4
Through the 1950s, what was often termed “family life education” continued to be seen as a remedy for all manner of ills, from masturbation to divorce, sexual maladjustment to crime, and marriages across barriers of social difference. Fear that juvenile delinquency was on the rise—stoked by the Kinsey reports and exemplified in headlines like Newsweek’s “The Kids Grow Worse”—was as palpable as fear of the atomic bomb. Adolescent sexual activity was believed to be increasing and wreaking havoc on morality. Sex ed curricula often sought to curb such illicit behavior by provoking similar fears in students. For instance, dramatic venereal disease films featured, as one former student remembered, “babies born with crusted eyes as a result of gonorrhea; both males and females in the tertiary stage of syphilis; drooling and walking with that strange gait that comes from tertiary syphilis; brain damage; open, running sores; and on and on.”5 Convincing adolescents to conform to wholesome American standards of sexual conduct took effort.
Children and child rearing approached the status of a social obsession during this period, and the stakes for mothers were especially high. “No matter how brilliant she is intellectually or how important a career she may have,” advised experts in a 1952 issue of Parents Magazine, “she doesn’t feel completely fulfilled until she has had at least one child.”6 Bound up in what the sociologist Kingsley Davis termed “the cult of marital happiness” and reinforced by a visible postwar baby boom overhung by threat of nuclear catastrophe, education in family life remained a product of the social hygiene mentality. Topics remained scrupulously mundane: “balancing a checkbook, applying for a job, learning to date, planning a wedding, finding a hobby,” even “jewelry and furniture shopping.”7 Sex was an urgent subtext, but only rarely a topic of direct instruction.
But as the 1950s became the 1960s, moral standards seemed to be rapidly disintegrating. Family life education appeared a miserable failure, and rising numbers of Americans agreed that new programs needed to be developed. Views differed, as they always had, on what should be taught in such programs and how. Should programs aim at persuading young
people never to have sex before marriage or simply address sex more forthrightly in its full biological and social context? There was no lack of opinion on this subject, as calls grew for schools to do a better job of instructing students in sexual behavior.
Mary Steichen Calderone was foremost among the people who answered these calls. Calderone had grown up in a sophisticated, elite world. Her mother, Clara Smith, had left her rural home in the Ozarks of southwestern Missouri, and her childhood world of Confederate pride and camp meeting conversions, to study music in Paris. There Clara met the artist Edward Steichen, who was already making a name for himself and would become an internationally renowned photographer; they married in New York’s Trinity Church in 1903, both shedding their religious backgrounds (hers evangelical Protestant, his staunch Catholic) to adopt a Quaker affiliation. Mary was born nine months after their wedding, and two years later the family returned to Paris, where Steichen felt his artistic ventures would flourish more than in the United States. Baby Kate, Mary’s sister, arrived two years after that. In 1908, Edward Steichen’s younger sister, Lilian, married a socialist journalist with a strong interest in human rights and social reform named Carl Sandburg, who would find renown as a writer nicknamed the “poet of the people.”8
From earliest childhood, then, Mary lived among diverse thinkers, writers, and artists. After graduating from the elite Brearley School in Manhattan, she studied at Vassar College, married and had children before divorcing, and decided to enter medical school at the age of thirty. She earned her medical degree at the University of Rochester in 1939 and a master’s degree at the Columbia University School of Public Health in 1942. She married a fellow physician, Frank Calderone, in 1941 and had two more children with him. Focused on public health, she worked as a physician in suburban New York schools for more than ten years. Her labors in the public health field were key to the development of her medical interest in human sexuality, and especially in the importance of contraceptive access and information as well as the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.
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