Margaret Grace Myers, "The Fight for Sex Ed: The Century-Long Battle Between Truth and Doctrine" (Beacon Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Margaret Grace Myers
Book Discussed: The Fight for Sex Ed: The Century-Long Battle Between Truth and Doctrine (Beacon Press, 2025)
Air Date: November 21, 2025

This episode explores the complex, century-long history of sex education debates in the United States, as unpacked in Margaret Grace Myers’s new book. Myers and the host delve into the origins of sex ed in America, the cycles of controversy, the influence of war and public health crises, the politicization of the topic (especially from the 1960s onward), and its present-day ramifications. The conversation emphasizes how the same foundational tensions—between "truth and doctrine"—recur across decades, fueling the ongoing battle over what young people should learn about sex.

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Guest Introduction and Book Genesis

• [03:02] Margaret Grace Myers introduces herself:
  • Studied English and religion with a focus on contemporary Christianity, power, and sexual health.
  • Discovered early debates on sex ed through family history (great-grandparents as doctors in Baltimore).
  • Motivated by discovering repetitive questions throughout history: "How early is too early to talk about sex? How much information is too much? Who should teach it? Where?"
  • Found a gap in historical literature: “I thought, well, where's the book about this? And it didn't exist... I guess maybe I'm the one who has to write it.” [04:31]

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Key Historical Phases & Insights

Early 20th Century Origins

• [05:27] Sex Ed in schools emerges in the early 1900s:

  • Triggered by industrialization and sky-high STI rates (e.g., "a full 77% of men in Baltimore had gonorrhea" - 1915).
  • Early reformers: doctors and Christian religious leaders.
  • Primary debates mirrored current ones: age appropriateness, home vs. school, and content scope.

• [07:26] First school-based efforts:

  • The American Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis (est. ~1906) initially focused outside schools.
  • By 1911-1912, consensus shifted to schools as the best venue.
  • Notable case: Ella Flagg Young in Chicago (1913) implemented "personal purity classes"—backed by medical and progressive reformers, but the outcry made them short-lived:
    “You can have all the best people lining up for why you should have it. And sometimes the controversy is just too much.” [10:17]

Impact of World War I

• [10:47] The military as a catalyst:

  • The U.S. contracted the American Social Hygiene Association to educate servicemen.
  • WWI forced recognition that STIs were a widespread public health crisis, not just a "moral failing" affecting "bad" people.

• Key Tension:

  • Social Hygiene Association advocated for abstinence as the only moral solution.

  • Military had a pragmatic goal: combat readiness, leading eventually to consideration of medical prophylactics.

  • Memorable quote:
    “It was very difficult to kind of connect those two dots... abstinence until marriage was still the...morally good [thing] and needed to be maintained. So there were all these very fine lines...” [14:15]

• [16:52] Funding and scaling up:

  • Chamberlain-Kahn Act (1918) formalized federal funding for venereal disease education and created structures that began involving schools.

World War II and Aftermath

• [19:01] Lessons learned (and not):

  • Military initially claimed WWI approach “worked,” but evidence suggested otherwise (U.S. didn’t distribute condoms in WWI, unlike Britain by war's end).
  • By WWII: shift to practical measures—condoms, prophylactic kits—reflecting realism over doctrine.
  • Data shattered the myth that STIs were limited to sex workers; “regular women” also affected, broadening the scope of sex ed’s necessity. [21:10]
    • “They were sort of shocked to discover, oh, it’s not sex workers, it’s quote unquote, regular women. And they realized, oh, this education needs to go so much further than we thought it did.” [21:59]

• [22:25] Postwar sex ed expands:

  • Rise of dedicated sex ed coordinators in schools.
  • STIs rarely addressed head-on; instead, focus shifted to "proper way to date and get married"—an indirect prevention method.

• Controversy Pattern:

  • Initial unanimous local support could be derailed by a few vocal outsiders, spiraling into wider outcry and reversal—“one of the more frustrating types of controversies.” [24:20]

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From Local to National Controversy: The 1960s Onward

• [25:39] A seismic shift:

  • Before the 1960s, opposition mainly came from American Catholics who wanted sex ed taught at home.
  • The rise of the religious (Christian) right in the 1960s mobilized national opposition, using powerful media strategies.
  • “Before abortion was the issue, sex ed was the issue.” [27:12]
    • Sex ed became an ideological cornerstone for the right; the formation of SECUS (Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States) provided a target/emblem.

• [28:54] Effects in the 1970s–1980s:

  • The right framed “sex ed” in schools as radical and permissive (“hippie, free love”).
  • In reality, abstinence had always been the main message.
  • Broader spectrum emerged:
    • Comprehensive sex ed (contraception, clinics, etc.) to abstinence-only models with zero info on contraception.
    • Massive regional disparity:
      “You could be learning completely different things and there could be zero overlap.” [33:11]

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Persistence of Abstinence and Present-Day Context

• [33:52] Research vs. Policy Reality:

  • Robust evidence shows abstinence-only ed does not reduce negative outcomes (pregnancy, STIs).
  • Policy lags evidence:
    • States and even districts retain local control, resulting in a patchwork of requirements—some counterfactual, some still homophobic and heteronormative.

• Notable quote:
  “I wish I could say that it affected it more, but it really hasn't, unfortunately...” [33:55]

• Contemporary impact:

  • U.S. continues to have some of the highest teen pregnancy and STI rates in the industrialized world; sex ed is a key, but not sole, variable.

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Why the Debate Persists

• [35:36] Cultural underpinnings:
  • Myers points to a pervasive “conspiracy of silence” about sex (citing Prince Morrow, early reformer).
  • There remains an American obsession with abstinence, even as cultural representations of sex are everywhere.
  • “I think there’s still this narrative in a lot of places that...we expect that people won’t have sex or won’t talk about or admit that they have sex until they get married, despite the fact that…sex is a huge part of media, books, movies, everything we do.” [35:37]
• Reflection: Knowing the history is part of breaking the silence, even if the future remains uncertain.

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Closing and Future Directions

• [37:22] Myers’s next steps:
  • No new book yet, now a stronger advocate for comprehensive sex ed:
    “I have definitely become more and more of an advocate for comprehensive sex ed in the United States. I think it is just so important, and I had no idea about how important it was until I started writing this book.”

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Notable Quotes by Segment

• [04:31] “Where’s the book about this? And it didn’t exist... I guess maybe I'm the one who has to write it.” – Margaret Grace Myers
• [10:17] “Sometimes the controversy is just too much.”
• [14:15] “Very fine lines that needed to be upheld during this time.”
• [21:59] “They realized, oh, this education needs to go so much further than we thought it did.”
• [27:12] “Before abortion was the issue, sex ed was the issue.”
• [33:11] “You could be learning completely different things and there could be zero overlap.”
• [33:55] “I wish I could say that it affected it more, but it really hasn't, unfortunately.”
• [35:37] “There’s still this narrative…we expect that people won’t have sex or won’t talk about or admit that they have sex until they get married, despite the fact that…sex is a huge part of media.”
• [37:38] “I have definitely become more and more of an advocate for comprehensive sex ed in the United States…”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Guest background & book genesis: [03:02–05:07]
• Origins of sex ed and early controversies: [05:27–10:24]
• Sex ed and World Wars: [10:47–22:09]
• Post-WWII expansion: [22:25–25:10]
• The 1960s: rise of the religious right: [25:39–28:28]
• Spectrum of modern sex ed and patchwork outcomes: [28:54–33:20]
• Evidence vs. policy: [33:52–34:55]
• Why sex ed remains contentious: [35:36–36:53]
• Guest’s current outlook and advocacy: [37:22–37:43]

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Conclusion

This episode provides an in-depth, lively, and revealing journey through the history of American sex education, demonstrating the deep roots of today's debates and the enduring tension between evidence, public health, and cultural doctrine. Myers’s historical lens reveals that the "fight for sex ed" has never truly been settled and is likely to remain contentious until broader social narratives—especially those around abstinence and silence—are confronted head-on.

Transcript

[A]

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[C]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Margaret Grace Myers about her book titled the Fight for Sex Ed the Century Long Battle between Truth and Doctrine, published by Beacon Press in 2025, explaining. Well, as it says, it turns out, it's been a century of debates around sex ed. That is very much a contemporary discussion that's happening in politics, in the media, in schools, in the US and in other countries. And it often is sort of framed as a thing that kind of is new right now, you know, whatever the new thing is now, that means we have rediscuss Sex Ed and actually this book helps us understand that it's always.

[D]

Kind of been talked about like, that.

[B]

Much further back than we might think, which is really interesting history to get into. So I'm quite looking forward to this conversation. Margaret, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[D]

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

[B]

Well, I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?

[D]

Yeah, absolutely. I think, like a lot of historians and authors, I sort of stumbled into the project. I knew I had always. I studied English and religion as an undergrad in college, and I had always been really interested in dynamics of contemporary Christianity and power and sexual health, kind of, you know, sort of reproductive justice as an. As an interesting topic. And then I was. I got a master's degree in the academic study of religion. I have a master's of Theological studies. And then after that, I got an MFA in nonfiction writing. And it was during my MFA, when I was. I really thought I was going to write about my great grandparents. And it was through them and their work in Baltimore, Maryland, in the turn of the 20th century that I came across these early ideas of sex ed. They were both doctors, and they were sort of very on the outskirts of these ideas of. Of really early ideas of sex ed. And as I was reading these debates that they were kind of tangentially part of, I thought to myself, wow, I have heard these conversations in my own life. And these were the conversations of how early is too early to talk about sex. How much information is too much information for a young person to have. Who's the best person to teach a young person about sex? Should it happen in school? Should it happen at home? At what age? And then I really did the thing I had heard about, and. But in this case, it really happened, you know, where I thought, well, where's the book about this? And it didn't exist, you know, And I thought, okay, I guess. I guess maybe I'm the one who has to write it. You know, the history of sex ed, really from, you know, the beginning right up until present day.

[B]

I find so many interesting books start from that point of finding out something you weren't expecting going, wow, I'd love to read more. Wait, there is no more. Okay then.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

So not surprised to hear that. That's the starting point for this book. Now, obviously, if we're talking about your grandparents, right, like, we're going decently far back in time, just from that. But more precisely, when, where, why do we start to see discussions about what should sex ed be in the U.S. yeah.

[D]

And so, to some extent, of course, there's always been in individual homes and communities, I'm sure, conversations about, you know, talking to your child, you know, you can imagine, sort of before a young woman gets married, and, you know, how, you know, talking about the facts of life in these ways. But talking about sex ed in schools or kind of more enshrined in these larger conversations really happened in America in the. In. As industrialization sort of boomed. So really, the, you know, turn of the 20th century, because in great part because of these enormous rates of sexually transmitted infections, which at the time were called venereal diseases. The one. The one statistic that I always. That really stuck with me was, I think it was 1915. One doctor in Baltimore, he found from his studies that he projected that a full 77.0percent of men in Baltimore had gonorrhea, which is just, you know, a huge number. And so there was really this feeling of on the part of doctors and also on the part of religious reformers, Christian religious reformers, that something is wrong. You know, this is a major problem, and what do we do to solve it was really the beginning of that conversation. And there were a lot of different things. And one of them was, okay, well, we should consider telling young people about the risks of sex.

[B]

Now, that's one thing to have that idea, then it's another to kind of decide to actually do it and teach young people that kind of information in schools. So what's the gap between having the idea and actually doing it? Like, when do we see this in some school system somewhere?

[D]

Yeah, so the first. It was really interesting. So the American Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, which is just an amazing sort of progressive era name, started in 1906, I believe, or somewhere in there. And for the first few years was really everyone in it who was made up of these sort of eminent gynecologists and educators and people who really wanted to the problem, you know, who were focused on the problem of reducing rates of STIs. And for the first few years, they just thought, there's no way to do this in schools. There's no way we can do this in schools. And they really focused instead on things like church groups, youth groups, working men's groups, so sort of young. Young men who they really thought would kind of need it the most. But by about 1911, 1912, almost that. Almost everybody agreed. School, public schools, was the place to teach people about sex in some way or another. And that was because they really just realized what is still true about schools. It's where the most people, you know, the most young people are. It is where you get the largest net. It is suited for, you know, it is literally there to educate people. You get the most people. They are there to learn. So the first example that I have, the first sort of case of sex ed that I have is in 1913 in the book In Chicago with this amazing woman named Ella Flagg Young, who was the first female superintendent in a city. She was a superintendent of Chicago schools. And she started, I mean, after this kind of amazingly arduous battle for sex ed. She got personal purity classes, is what she called them, in Chicago public schools. And this. There was a huge amount of controversy from so many different people. But she really had the power of the kind of medical authorities. She had the power of these progressive activists like Jane Adams from the Settlement House, from Hull House, really supported her. And she got it pushed through. And the rates of STIs in Chicago were very high, which is also one of the reasons why she was really able to do it. But those classes only lasted a semester after. There was just so much controversy and so much outcry that it just didn't last very long after all. So after all that work, and that's really been a theme that we continue to see in sex ed is you can have all the best people lining up for why you should have it. And sometimes the controversy is just too much.

[B]

Yeah, that is definitely a pattern that is familiar. So interesting to see it kind of quite so far back. That is not, however, where we stop with the history of sex ed. We do see it continue despite that controversy.

[A]

We.

[B]

What role did World War I have in extending sort of the need for why we should keep going, even though it was so controversial in the first instance.

[D]

Absolutely. So World War I was huge. And so I mentioned the American Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, which was this group that really led the way in having these ideas about Sex Edition. By World War I, it had kind of morphed into this group called the American Social Hygiene Association. And the world. Or when the United States became involved in the war, they contracted Asia, the Social Hygiene Association. And they basically said, we know this STIs might. Might be a thing kind of, you know. And they sort of said, can you help us? They contracted them and it was. And they kind of set up this whole system, all of this education for training camps, because what. And what they found was that recruits were absolutely coming in with STIs and they were leaving with STIs, and there was just sexually transmitted infections everywhere. And it was this really interesting moment because did a few different things. And one of the things it did is that it showed America. It showed the power. Well, it showed the powers that be, you know, the government, that this was a problem that was affecting everybody. So until then, which I haven't really chatted about with you yet, is STIs were really seen as affecting people who were, quote, unquote, bad in some way. So even though we have These numbers, like 70% of men in Baltimore, it was still kind of commonly believed that STIs were contracted by someone who either was a sex worker or had hired a sex worker. And in some way, in that case was sort of viewed as a moral punishment. And it was. It was a fair punishment. And so it was really easy to just sort of write it off and to say, well, that's not my problem. You know, it's. It's kind of. That's what you get was really this overarching idea. And what you could do with some of those early sex ed is you could say, okay, but we can sort of begin to talk a little bit about the facts of life, quote, unquote, and how a baby is born, what that might look like, you know, just because what people were slightly more willing to. To believe or slightly more willing to admit was, okay, so maybe this does indicate that there is a lack of knowledge overall about sexual. But it was very difficult to kind of connect those two dots of, you know, you still had to maintain this idea. I guess the other main idea really was that abstinence until marriage was still the. Was morally good and needed to be maintained. So there were all of these very fine lines that needed to be upheld during this time. And so During World War I, it was really fascinating because you couldn't quite keep up this line, that it was just these sort of horribly immoral people when you had all of these young recruits coming in with STIs, because it just kind of couldn't be the case. But also what you had was the United States finally being. Being motivated to solve the problem, because it also was a huge. It caused a lot of days that they. That people couldn't be. They called it like, disability days of disability, that they weren't able to be actively part of the military. And so that also really helped to elucidate this core conflict in sex ed, because the American Social Hygiene association was really, really, really invested in abstinence for abstinence sake. This idea that being abstinent until marriage was good on its own, the fact that it also reduced rates of STIs, was kind of proof that it was good, but it. But sort of beside the point. And then you had the military, which was way more practical and really just wanted the troops to be back in action as fast as possible and wanted to provide these medical means of preventing STIs. And so for the. For Asha, who really wanted these boys to be pure, establishing prophylactic stations and offering information about cleaning themselves was really kind of, to them, seemed really hypocritical because they thought, well, we're producing all of this information about how they should remain abstinent. And all of a sudden you're turning around and you're providing information about what to do once you haven't been abstinent anymore. And so that, again, is really one of the key conflicts that we see in sex ed today. But at home and at the training camps, all of the education really did focus on abstinence and remaining abstinence. And because the government was putting so much money and effort into that, all of that messaging and sometimes the literal things that were made, the material that was made was put into public schools and was able to be adapted in some way for public schools or for other, like, traveling lecturers and things.

[B]

That's a pretty intensive effort. Though, obviously you've explained why it was so important for the military to kind of bother with all of this. Was it the military paying for it, too?

[D]

Yeah. So the Chamberlain Khan act was established in 1918, and it did a lot of things. There's a great book by Scott Stern. What's it called?

[B]

The trials of Nina McCall.

[D]

Yes, exactly. And so what that did was it allowed you to detain women who were sex workers. It allowed you to do, you know, this intensive STI screening. But what it also did was establish funding for venereal. Venereal disease control. And it gave money to states for that education. So it set up a lot of state social hygiene boards and departments which would then go and establish, like, lecture series or teaching in. In schools and kind of any number.

[B]

Of things paid for by the US Government, paid for by the military. Like, who exactly is making this possible financially? Because it's a big effort.

[D]

It was a huge effort. I mean, really kind of amazing when you think about it. And it was federal funding. Yeah, so it was federal funding for that And I don't know exactly now that I'm thinking about it. So it's such a good question of exactly where and how the funding sort of shifted and split and morphed, because I'm sure there was some element of that. But, yeah, it was absolutely. It's federal funding for venereal Disease Control, which was really mostly just don't have sex.

[B]

Okay. I mean, very clear message, Very clear incentive to put that message out. I think by now we know, though, that that is not exactly the only lesson that one can learn from these kinds of campaigns. So how much learning do we see if we move forward in time? Like, if we look, stay with the US Military for a moment when they're kind of realizing that they're probably gonna have to have some kind of involvement in World War II, starting to plan for that. You know, that's something we look at in military history all the time. How much is the US Military looking back on, for example, the lessons of World War I, to plan for World War II, but through the angle of sex Ed? Is that some of the learning they're trying to take from the past or did they just start from scratch in the 40s?

[D]

No, it was really interesting, and at first it was very interesting to read the. The literature, and I really am a primary sources person. And at the very beginning, you see the military on all the official documents, and they contracted Asia again. And they basically said this plan worked, which is very interesting because by a lot of measures, it didn't. It didn't really work. The United States was the only country in World War I not to provide condoms for their troops in Europe. The. The Britain at the very beginning didn't. But by the end, it was, I believe, Britain did as well, provide condoms. But they really said, you know, okay, we're going to kind of stay the course. We know what works. But pretty quickly, by world. During World War II, the military basically came in and. And they were like, listen, this isn't, you know, maintaining this idea that abstinence that. That men should. Well, that everyone should maintain abstinence before marriage and abstinence while they're here. It's just not practical and it's not working. And so there were. That's when we see condoms, that's when we see prophylactic kits all being provided in the military. And it's also, again, when we see sex ed being in back, you know, in public schools, being far more important. And both in World War I and in World War II, the stakes for sex ed feel so much higher because you have all these rates of STIs. And the whole message on the ground in public schools was really, you know, be good, don't have sex. Here's how to be a good wife, here's how to be a good husband. And ideally, that gets you out of the. Even the possibility of contracting STIs. And so you can. You get this huge influx of funding, of interest, of parents being interested in sex ed in schools, of groups saying, hey, what are we doing about teaching sex ed in schools? Because it's just seeming more and more clear that it's important. The other thing that World War II, World War II did was that it really showed people that it really killed this idea that STIs were only caused by sex workers, which was still this very prevalent idea, even though, I mean, really just doesn't make any sense when you think about it. But again, with the wars, you just have so much more data than you ever had before. And there was. There were these studies about who men were actually sleeping with, and they were sort of shocked to discover, oh, it's not sex workers, it's quote unquote, regular women. And they realized, oh, this education needs to go so much further than we thought it did.

[B]

Hmm, okay. That's an important realization then, to have. What did they do about it, though? Like, did these kind of realizations go beyond the military to influence wider societal engagement with sex ed after the war?

[D]

Yeah, so I would say so after the war, you see a lot more sex ed in schools, and you see people whose job it is to coordinate sex ed and teach it, kind of figure out how it can be in schools. Again, it's never addressed. The issue of STI is really. Is still not addressed head on in curricula. What is addressed is. What is it called? What was often called, like, normal adjustment. So the idea being that don't just tell people how to prevent STIs or that STIs exist or that you could get them and how you can get them, but teach young people the proper way to date and get married, and then you avoid the problem altogether. So it's a kind of. It's not backwards. I was going to say it's a sort of backwards way of dealing with it. But it's a very sort of. It's not quite A to B, but it's sort of A to Z of education. But it was. It absolutely got sex ed into. Into way more schools.

[B]

Okay. And was it controversial at this point or was it seen sort of as like a useful thing to be doing.

[D]

I mean, a little bit of both. And often really what happened was it would be. And this is still how it is. And I think it's how it's. It has been a sort of universal fact of sex ed that the stakeholders, the people who are in this case in the military, in the government, then even administrators and teachers, even parents and students, all sort of say, this is something we need, this is good, and we like it and we want it. And then what happens is you have one or two people who aren't in these communities who become really upset and think that it's about something else, who haven't done the research. And those happen in it's not isolated communities, but it happens in these communities. And then it can sort of spiral and move outward and sort of balloon into something bigger and bigger. And so oftentimes it's things that have full, you know, it has passed in every committee and school board and everybody feels really good about it and then somebody will catch wind of it and it kind of gets completely shut down for that reason. So it's one of the more frustrating types of controversies because the people who are in it all sort of agree on it.

[B]

Yeah, no, that makes sense framed that way. Of course, if we move forward in time, obviously we're at a point more recently where sex ed is kind of very controversial in a lot of senses. One of the things I found interesting in the book is that we've gone kind of much further back in the 20th century than I'd sort of expected us to. And a bunch of the things you've explained have been kind of controversial, but not necessarily national controversy. That seems to change sort of about in the 1960s. Is that right? Why then?

[D]

Yeah, so with the 60s, you have the introduction of the religious right. And until then in America, the. In sex ed, the primary anti sex ed voice when it came to religion was really from American Catholics who had a real sense that sex needed to be taught about at home, that sex could only be taught in a religious context. And that if you taught it in public schools, it was not being carefully attended to and it wasn't being attended to in a Catholic context. And so. And oftentimes sex ed classes allowed for parents to opt out. There were controversies that, you know, might have happened in a singular, in a community, and then they sort of died down. It kind of wasn't the end of the world. And things sort of hummed along. But then by the 60s, you had the emergence of the Christian right. Or the religious right or the radical right. That was the confluence of a lot of different things, but really kind of ended up being, you know, this confluence of politics and of, you know, these kind of quote unquote, traditional values. And one of the things that it also had was this amazing kind of mobilization of media and print media and radio and later tv, of course. And sex ed became this absolute cornerstone of their platform in this way, where I was. This was kind of amazing to me. One of those moments in my research where I thought, oh, I did not know this, but I often frame it that before abortion was the issue, sex ed was the issue. I mean, there are books and pamphlets and all of these things at the same time. In 1964, a group called SECUS was founded. It's the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. It still exists. Doesn't stand for that anymore. It's just called Sikhus. And so what you have in. And that kind of came to stand in for sex ed writ large, even though it was kind of one organization. And sex ed has existed for a long time. And so you have Sikhus, which is sort of like an emblem of sex ed as it exists, and then you have the religious right in this kind of new, shiny form. And it really allows the narrative to become clear or simplified for the first time, because you have both of these things kind of on a national stage.

[B]

Okay, so we've gotten to the point then of this all being, as you said, very much national. What then were the range of options about kind of what should or shouldn't be done about it? Like, if we go into, for example, the 1970s, the 1980s, if everyone's going around having these debates very publicly, you're going to end up with a lot of different solutions in this school district or that state. So what's the sort of range we're talking about?

[D]

Well, so really what happens is the. The. And the main argument, to be clear, that the religious right is making is that the sex ed that is being promoted is this kind of hippie, like, free love, radical sex ed, where they're just teaching kids, you know, like, how to have sex. There's this one book that it's called, like, is Raw Sex, you know, right for the schoolhouse or something, you know, and it's. It's this really elevated rhetoric, even though the foundation of sex ed in America has always been abstinence, abstinence before marriage. But that is what became the kind of major argument is that. That the. That when we talk about, quote, unquote Sex ed. The religious right framed it really handily as sex ed teaches kids that it's okay to have sex and that the moral Christian point of view is that people shouldn't have sex before marriage. And so sex ed is bad. That kind of became this popular. That became kind of the most simplified way to understand these. This, you know, dissonance. And of course, it kind of overlooks the fact that sex ed has always been really about teaching young people not to have sex before marriage. In the 60s, what you did see see was some shifts where all of a sudden you were responding to a shift in cultural standards and shifting cultural norms where students were getting. Were asking more complicated questions, and they were asking things like, okay, but if I love this person, why shouldn't I have sex with them? And there are a lot of educational theorists who are sort of saying, well, we owe people, we owe our. Our students answers that respect them basically as the. As. As these thinking people that they are and the religious right. You know, these kind of extremely, you know, these people who really became obsessed with sex ed took that out of context and would really sort of, you know, claim that they're. They're teaching about sex, teaching how to make sex, you know, teaching young people how to have sex. Anyway, so that's, that's kind of the frame of the late 60s that then propels into the 70s. What you also have is increased funding for things like teen pregnancy prevention. But yeah, that's also where we start to see this absolute kind of these official ways of thinking about sex ed and this extremely broad out, you know, broad spectrum of what can be sex ed. Because sometimes you would have really strong things like health clinics in schools, school clinics, where they provide things like birth control and care for pregnant teenagers, and comprehensive sex ed, which is. Became a framework where you can learn about contraception. And then on the other hand, you have what became termed as abstinence only sex ed, where students were given no information about contraception. And then you can kind of have any number of things in between, and all of those can kind of count, quote unquote, as sex ed.

[B]

Okay, that's a lot of different things. So useful to have it broken down because it clearly just saying sex ed doesn't mean the same in every place.

[D]

It really doesn't. I often think about like, if you had a student in Maine, where I live, I'm a student in California, on the other side of the country, and they both were sophomores in high school taking a calculus class, you could imagine, right? Yeah. Of course you're not going to be doing the same exact problems, but you would imagine that you could both pass, you know, a sophomore calculus test. But that is not the same with sex ed. You could be learning completely different things and there could be zero overlap. And that has been well documented, this phenomenon and has made it really hard to study sex ed and what works in sex ed and what sex ed is and how to make it better.

[B]

Yeah, no, it definitely makes it challenging to do any sort of comparison, but there is obviously attempts at researching all of this, and some things are better understood than others. So one thing that we have a decent grasp of by now is that abstinence only education doesn't really make much difference in terms of these sorts of negative outcomes that you have been telling us were an issue all the way back at the beginning of the 1900s. So given that we know that pretty definitively, has that influenced policy choices at all?

[D]

I wish it. I wish I could say that it affected it more, but it really hasn't, unfortunately. I mean, there, you know, America is so big, and we leave a lot up to. In the United. You know, we leave so much up to states, and then with education, we leave it up to school boards, so districts, and then the school itself and then the classroom itself. So in some places we have really strong. Some states will have really strong guidelines about teaching medically accurate, comprehensive sex ed. And some states, you still have to stress abstinence is the phrasing they'll use. Or in some states, you still have really homophobic guidelines that are enshrined in state law, because it's sort of still all in this, wrapped up in these kind of extremely heteronormative, you know, kind of focused on procreating in the correct way, and that's still there. So it's a real mixed bag.

[B]

Okay, well, I suppose that helps us explain why this is still a topic that's being discussed, right?

[D]

Yeah, absolutely. And it's, you know, and the United States has one of the. Some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy, some of the Highest rates of STIs in the industrialized world. And it's. Sex ed, of course, is not the only factor, but it's certainly a factor worth examining.

[B]

Yeah, that's really interesting to understand. Are there any other ways in which kind of you see links between the things you found in the archives and the primary sources and where the US Is at with this today? Anything we haven't mentioned yet you want to include?

[D]

Oh, I mean, I think the thing That I pay attention to the most or have sort of seen the most is the American. I call it kind of the obsession with abstinence is they really see it everywhere. It's still kind of a narrative that a lot of people subscribe to, whether they think they do or not. I think there's still this narrative in a lot of places that you kind of still are sort of. We expect that people won't have sex or won't talk about or admit that they have sex until they get married. Despite the fact that in culture, sex is still is a huge part of media, books, movies, everything we do and everything we see. And it's. I think it's a real detriment to open, honest conversations because, you know, it just. It kind of. The Prince Morrow, who started the American Society of Sanitarian Moral Prophylaxis called it a conspiracy of silence around sex. And I think that despite how far we've come, I think we still have that in the United States.

[B]

Well, at least knowing the history of it is part of trying to break that silence.

[D]

Yes, I have to hope so. Yeah.

[B]

No, fair enough. Well, obviously we don't know yet if or when that silence will be fully broken. Efforts like this contribute to it, but we cannot read the future. But it is on that sense of reading maybe a little bit of the future that I'd love to ask my final question. Which is your future? I don't know. Has doing all this research given you another book that doesn't exist that you have to go write? Are you working on something else that's not even a book, like anything on your horizon you want to give us a sneak preview of?

[D]

Well, I don't have any. No book project has revealed itself yet. I would say now it's interesting. I have definitely become more and more of an advocate for comprehensive sex ed in the United States. I think it has just so important. And I had no idea about how important it was until I started writing this book.

[B]

Yeah, well, it's definitely quite a current topic as well as obviously being historical ones. So for any listeners who want to learn more, the book is titled the Fight for Sex Ed the Century Long Battle between Truth and Doctrine, published by Beacon Press in 2025. Margaret, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[D]

Thank you so much for having me, Sam.