Moral Combat

by R. Marie Griffith

  During the 1950s, Calderone returned to her early religious roots by becoming active in the Quaker community (also known as the Religious Society of Friends), an affiliation that she considered very much a part of the larger Christian tradition. She was officially accepted as a member, or “received by request,” into the Westbury (New York) Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends.9 Thereafter, she frequently stated her commitment to Quaker principles, which would shape her ongoing life’s work, including her focus on sex. In a Quaker pamphlet she later wrote, Calderone noted, “One hardly thinks of Friends, men or women, as revolutionaries and, in truth, their outer demeanor, comportment and life style have tended to be quiet and conservative. But on major social issues—slavery, peace, alternative service during war, religious ecumenicism, racial equality—on such issues Quaker concern and conscience come on strong. Quaker voices are usually heard loud and clear ‘speaking truth to power.’”10

  In 1953, a few years before she renewed her affiliation with the Quakers, Calderone joined the staff of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the organization founded by Margaret Sanger in 1938 as the American Birth Control League. True to the strong spirit of its founding mother, PPFA remained focused on birth control, and from the very start Calderone’s work for the organization centered on controversial issues relating to sex and gender. An early assignment from the organization’s executive director, William Vogt, was to create some kind of signature event to showcase in a fresh way Planned Parenthood itself and the need for contraceptive services. She came back to Vogt with the idea of a conference on abortion, specifically illegally procured abortions as a major public health problem that deserved attention (and one that could be mitigated by better access to birth control). Throughout the United States at this time, abortion was a crime in all circumstances except to save the life of the mother (and, in six states, to save the life of the fetus).Vogt assented and put Calderone in charge of the conference, held in 1955; she later edited the conference proceedings into a book, Abortion in the United States, which was published in 1958.11 While there was no way to get trustworthy statistics of an illegal and heavily punished activity such as abortion, the conference’s statistics committee estimated the frequency of illegal abortion in the United States to be “as low as 200,000 and as high as 1,200,000 per year.” Many of the procedures resulted in injury and even death at the hands of the “crude abortionists” to whom desperate women often resorted, at great personal and social expense.12

  Calderone authored her own work too, showing particular concern for the sexual problems of women as well as the obviously unequal health dangers and consequences faced by women who procured illegal abortions, often because they did not have adequate information on how to prevent pregnancy. A journal article she wrote in 1960 was called “Illegal Abortion as a Public Health Problem,” and she used a strongly worded editorial in the same journal later that year to critique male physicians for their poor understanding of women’s psychosexual problems.13 In the same year, Calderone published her first full book (with help from science writers Phyllis Goldman and Robert Goldman), Release from Sexual Tensions, a book about sex and love that was focused especially on solving problems in marriage. Despite the curious title, which suggested nothing so much as a masturbation manual, the “tensions” invoked were interpersonal, not physiological; her interests in educating readers about these matters could almost have aligned her squarely with the family life education programs of the time.

  Calderone’s interest in better sex education was apparent in her work from the beginning. During her eleven years at PPFA, Calderone became a noted speaker and writer on birth control, which was still a controversial if not shameful subject in the early years of her time there. As women’s health care was increasingly a prominent theme in her work, she was keenly interested in helping women gain knowledge of, and access to, contraception. She played a crucial role in persuading the American Medical Association that doctors ought to distribute contraceptive information and offer contraceptive access to all patients who needed it, and a proposal eventually passed to affirm that family planning is “more than a matter of responsible parenthood; it is a matter of responsible medical practice.”14 That statement, she later (rightly) recalled, “really did come from my efforts, first to get them to set up the committee to develop the statement, and then to work on the committee.”15

  In 1961, Calderone participated as an invited guest and the official delegate of Planned Parenthood at the historic Green Lake conference, where she gave a plenary address focused on the need for responsible family planning and the inculcation of “a sense of responsibility about the use of sex.”16 As it was for many of the attendees, the Green Lake conference was important for Calderone. To the Reverend William Genné, director of the Family Life Department of the National Council of Churches, she wrote afterward, “Needless to say, it was a memorable experience—probably the high point for me in my eight years” at Planned Parenthood. She told one of the conference’s cochairs that the event was “probably the most enriching experience I have ever had. Nothing will ever be quite the same for me again.”17 Calderone was now attuned to the exciting new work on sexuality coming out of the churches, and over the next two or three years many of the professionals who had gathered at Green Lake would continue to debate, in Calderone’s words, “what are we going to do about this sex mess—the attitudes in society are very bad.”18 Although some experts insisted that education about sex should remain under the auspices of marriage counseling or family life education, others agreed with Calderone that it needed a new approach.

  Eventually, Calderone came up with the idea of a voluntary health organization that would focus on sex education and “put sexuality into the field of health rather than the field of morals.”19 So it was that in the year she turned sixty, 1964, Calderone left Planned Parenthood and, with four others who had been at Green Lake—William Genné, sexuality educator Lester Kirkendall, Quaker sociologist Clark Vincent, and public health educator Wallace C. Fulton—cofounded the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, a nonprofit organization seeking to bring scientifically based sexuality education wherever it was needed.

  The SIECUS statement of purpose described its aim as “to establish man’s sexuality as a health entity.” This effort would be accomplished in three main ways: identifying the “special characteristics” of sexuality that were distinct from (though of course related to) human reproduction; dignifying sexuality through an open, scientific, research-minded approach; and assembling information for professionals and for people throughout society, so that all might be better equipped to act responsibly and healthfully in their sexual behavior and experience sex “as a creative and re-creative force.”20 Heading SIECUS for eighteen years, Calderone lectured frequently around the country and also published several books on sex for a range of audiences. She became nationally known for her work promoting sex education programs for use in public schools, including the widely used publication Guidelines for Sexuality Education: Kindergarten Through Twelfth Grade. Her hope, shared by the wider SIECUS staff and board members, was to make comprehensive sex education the norm across the nation. While SIECUS and Calderone had a broad mission when it came to educating people about sex, they became particularly infamous for promoting sex ed in schools.

  Calderone believed that Americans received misinformation about sex starting in infancy, from parents, religion, and any number of other social influences; her goal was to replace these half-truths and distortions with a mix of scientific and social teaching. But far worse than misinformation, in her view, were the harmful attitudes toward sex that children picked up from prudish influences both within and beyond the home. Even when parents, teachers, or religious leaders believed themselves not to be providing any sexual education whatsoever, they too frequently influenced boys and girls alike in damaging ways. As a SIECUS publication proclaimed, “avoidance, repression, rejection, suppression, e
mbarrassment, and shock are negative forms of sex education.” A positive attitude toward sex and sexuality was crucial to the mental, emotional, and physical health of these children as they grew into maturity.21

  As the nation’s foremost nationally recognized proponent of sex education, Mary Steichen Calderone played a critical role in the cultural and religious conflagrations over sex in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. A staunch Quaker and pacifist, and a person of emphatically conventional mores in her private life, Calderone never sought to stoke the fires of warfare, even cultural warfare. But she was a woman who dared to advocate publicly in favor of greater sexual candor and in-depth education for all Americans, and her successful efforts landed her squarely in the firing line of those who likened candor to immorality and deemed “education” coded speech for corruption.

  Although very much a revolutionary in her long labors on behalf of birth control access and sex education, Calderone was a conservative insofar as she proclaimed publicly that sexual freedom was ultimately for the purpose of strengthening stable families and permanent relationships, which would thereby sustain society. In the Manual of Contraceptive Practice she edited under the auspices of PPFA in 1964, she made this point clear: “The role of sex is basic to the marital relationship that in itself is the fundamental building block of our society as it is presently constituted,” while contraception should be regarded “as the servant of marriage, never as an end in itself.” In a 1966 speech delivered at a high school in Hartford, Connecticut, she lamented that many youth now treated sexual experience as a right rather than a privilege earned through maturity and asked, “Why are we afraid to say, ‘You are just plain too young?’” The journalist Mary Breasted, who interviewed Calderone at a peak moment in the controversy over sex education in 1969, argued that she advocated sex education as “basically a form of moral indoctrination,” and claimed that the work of SIECUS was essentially “an attempt to bolster conventional morality by rendering it more tolerable.” To Playboy magazine in 1970, even as she noted that she could and would not “stop society from evolving” nor “force other people to adhere to my personal beliefs,” Calderone openly confessed “my really profound belief that sex belongs primarily in marriage.” Because “casual sex” was simply sex for pleasure, with no regard for any relationship between the partners, she averred, “I’m not looking forward happily to a widespread acceptance of casual sex.”22

  Calderone looked on heterosexual relationships as the foundation of society, and she saw SIECUS as working to strengthen “effective, strong, permanent relationships—which usually translates into having or being part of a family.” At the same time, in discussing a wide range of sexual expressions that included bisexuality and homosexuality, she noted, “I can’t find it in my heart to reject anyone because of their sexual behavior.… There is really no manifestation of sexuality that should put us off, that should make us look down on somebody. If that’s where they are, we have to accept them there.” Calderone wrestled with the question of whether sexual nonconformity outside marriage would threaten familial and social stability or not. But she was tolerant and very trusting of the young people she met at her lectures, who inspired her with optimism and the courage to honor views beyond her own ingrained conventionality.23 Her goal, at heart, was thoroughgoing honesty about bodily desires and the consequences of acting heedlessly and obliviously on them. Calderone sought to overcome prudishness and the ignorance that was its inevitable result, and in true Quaker fashion, she also sought to eradicate hypocrisy in all its forms.

  SIECUS emerged directly out of Calderone’s own religious sensibility. “Being a Quaker,” she wrote, “lays on one the responsibility for engaging in a continuing internal process of finding out what one really believes in, and relentlessly tracking down one’s bigotries, prejudices, inconsistencies, blindnesses, and refusals to recognize truth and accept it as such.” At the time she formed SIECUS, with the Green Lake conference still emanating its influence, “the conviction came to me that responsible parenthood is but a small segment of something much larger—responsible sexuality—which itself is but a segment of the all-encompassing concept of total responsibility in all human relationships” (emphasis in original). The resulting organization had a “spirit of ecumenical professionalism” and included clergy advisors who were Jewish and Catholic as well as Protestant, representing “all shades from right to left—although not the extremes of either.” In another context, Calderone approvingly quoted social ethicist and Episcopal priest Gibson Winter’s statement, “The recovery of sexuality is part of our salvation—an aspect of wholeness.” Traditional religion had often erred in teaching children that sex was dirty rather than “sacred and beautiful.” Calderone continued by saying that part of the work of sexual educators was to draw out “what is already there within [the child] that is good” (emphasis in original). This itself was a religious mission, she insisted: “This belief in the implicitness of the child’s goodness parallels the Quaker recognition of that of God in every man. Whether one be Christian, Jew, theist or nontheist, black or white, we cannot exist, or survive, in the absence of the profound belief that to be human is to be good. And because human beings were created sexual, then to be sexual must—or should—also be good.”24

  The Supreme Court’s June 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut offered a nexus of principles that Calderone could heartily approve. Striking down a Connecticut law that prohibited any person from using medical or other means to prevent pregnancy, the justices sided with Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut executive director Estelle Griswold and Yale School of Medicine physician Dr. C. Lee Buxton (who was the Planned Parenthood chapter’s medical director), ruling in favor of a “right to privacy” for married couples and greater leeway for health providers to provide patients with birth control. For the physician Calderone, the decision correctly placed contraceptive decisions in the hands of ordinary people, who still needed to seek wise guidance from trusted authorities rather than succumb to the “sexual chaos” of the times. In an extended visit to Washington University in St. Louis just months after the Griswold decision, she spoke to students as the university’s first “physician in residence” while again stressing her Quaker identity. “We are for the first time in history at a point where man can separate his sexual life from his reproductive life,” she warned before making a Cold War analogy: “Sexual responsibility is a social responsibility.… Like atomic energy, sex is a potent force we must learn to use constructively or we can destroy ourselves.” Once more, the credentialed professional provided the example to her audience of the sort of expert from whom such vital lessons should come.25

  As school leaders across the country during the mid-1960s grew increasingly convinced of the need for robust programs of sex education, SIECUS was there to assist. And because SIECUS at this early stage embodied its leaders’ fairly conservative outlook, the organization’s materials were palatable to a wide range of educators. Calderone and her colleagues wrote passionately about social problems like venereal disease among teens, rising divorce rates, and alarming statistics about teen pregnancies; they plausibly cast sex education as “preventative medicine.”26 Sex education programs created by SIECUS and other organizations burgeoned during the mid-1960s, as panicked parents and educators sought to remedy the sexual problems they witnessed around them. Experts estimated that nearly 50 percent of American school systems had adopted some type of sex education program by 1968.

  California was especially ripe territory for the sex education movement. Governor Edmund Brown was keen to develop a curriculum in family life education to curb out-of-wedlock pregnancy, divorce, and other problems pertaining to sexuality and marriage. When the Sacramento County school board decided to act in 1968–1969, it called on SIECUS staff, including Calderone, to develop its K-12 Family Life and Sex Education program. Districts in Oakland, Palo Alto, and San Mateo County worked to create their own programs, which
were much blunter about sexual details than the family life education programs of prior decades. Like Calderone and SIECUS itself, the new programs sought not to be preachy while still favoring relatively conventional sexual standards and attempting to contain youthful behavior. Teachers presented eye-raising statistics about venereal disease and stories of the sad consequences of teen pregnancy. This was the kind of sex education most parents wanted, a program that could shore up traditional morality. Both the programs that SIECUS helped set up in the mid-1960s and others that developed concurrently shared this ethos.27

  The embrace of sex education at the local level, as in these California districts, quickly prompted a severe backlash and provoked numerous battles. As the work of SIECUS became influential and widely known, opposition to the organization and to Calderone personally grew especially fierce. Critics were dismayed by the proliferation of sex ed programs on the ground, and many came to see her as the chief adversary in this fight. The most significant opposition came from two groups that collaborated often during the 1960s: the John Birch Society, founded as an anti-Communist conservative advocacy organization in 1958, and the Christian Crusade of Billy James Hargis, himself a Bircher. Both bodies were influential in this conflict, but the particular focus on sex education by some key staffers at the Christian Crusade gave it the greater impact. Assisting sex education opponents in scores of local school battles nationwide, Hargis’s institution proved a formidable challenge to Calderone’s own crusade for sexual truth.