Sex Ed, Segregated

In this slim volume, the historian Courtney Q. Shah shows how advocates of sex education in the early twentieth century used segregation to reinforce social hierarchies associated with race, gender, and, to a lesser extent, class and sexual orientation. Like much of the material in the book, the main argument is neither novel nor surprising. Indeed, a similar thesis animates Julian B. Carter's The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1890–1940 (2007). It would be more shocking to discover that the United States separated the races and sexes for general educational purposes—as it commonly did in the Progressive Era—but integrated them for sex education. Shah's central theme might not impress, but her book makes important contributions to histories of sex education, progressivism, and World War I. Sex education was, Shah shows, a major source of controversy between medical professionals and “purity reformers” as well as between advocates for school-based sex education programs and defenders of parental prerogative. Eugenic-oriented sex education appealed to many, including African American promoters of racial uplift. Others opposed it as racist and potentially coercive. During World War I, the state partnered with private organizations such as the American Social Hygiene Association and the Young Men's Christian Association to create sex education programs for its campaign against venereal disease. Shah demonstrates how deep-seated racial and gender biases shaped programs and policies: prophylactics were made readily available for sexually active white men and rehabilitative detention homes were available for “promiscuous” white women, but black men and women were segregated and incarcerated as unredeemable sources of contamination

Eugenics · Human sexuality · Political science · Politics · Progressivism · Race (biology · Sexual orientation · Sociology · White (mutation · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law