| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education before the 1960s. By Susan K. Freeman. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. xviii, 220 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03324-7. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-252-07531-5.)
Susan K. Freeman's Sex Goes to School joins an emerging literature on the history of sexuality that examines the rise of sex education in the United States. Until now, the history of sex education has been offered as a history of ideas, and in Freeman's surmise, historians have done well in examining "the moralizing aspect of sex education, trends in method and epistemology, and critiques of educators' agendas" (p. xiii). But Freeman moves beyond that initial work to explore the gendered dimensions of sex education as it was introduced into secondary education during the 1940s and 1950s across the United States.	1
Sex education had its roots in the social hygiene movement of the early twentieth century, which was preoccupied with the dangers of sexual promiscuity. During the 1930s, however, the earlier emphasis on immorality and disease yielded to psychological and social approaches, preparing the way for the middle decades of the twentieth century, which witnessed the normalization of discussions about sexuality with adolescents. As Freeman and others point out, in contrast to collective memory of the era, the 1940s and 1950s were more progressive than we might assume and also more forward-looking than the decade that followed, which saw a reaction against popular sex education even in the midst of greater toleration for sexual expression in mass culture.	. . .

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