A Q&A with Margaret Grace Myers
The US has some of the highest rates of STIs and teen pregnancies in the industrialized world. A comprehensive sex education curriculum—which teaches facts on contraception, prophylactics, consent, and STIs—has been available since the 1990s. Yet the majority of states require that sex education stress abstinence, and twenty-two states do not require sex ed in public schools at all.
In The Fight for Sex Ed: The Century-Long Battle Between Truth and Doctrine, writer, advocate, and historian Margaret Grace Myers shows us how we got here. While the earliest calls for sex ed came from a coalition of religious leaders and doctors at the turn of the century who sought to control the prevalence of STIs, the advent of antibiotics and modern condoms meant that abstinence was no longer good public health policy. The religious right, however, continued to frame it as such, using its impressive machinery to replace scientific facts with conservative Christian values. Myers also shows how the religious right has worked to narrow the discourse around sex ed, decade after decade, often dictating the terms of debate almost entirely. We caught up with her to have a two-part chat about her book. This is part one of two.
Beacon Press: What inspired you to write The Fight for Sex Ed?
Margaret Grace Myers: I really fell into the topic of the history of sex ed in the United States while doing research about my great grandparents, who were both biologists at the turn of the twentieth century in Baltimore. They were casually involved in the social hygiene movement, which was a public health effort that tied together morality and medicine in an attempt to curb STIs, and where we really see the beginning of modern sex ed in the United States. From reading those early accounts of meetings and literature, I was struck by the fact that the debates seemed very similar to questions I had heard in my own life about how, what, when, and where to teach young people about sex. That was the seed of the book.
BP: Many people assume sex ed has improved over time. What surprised you most in researching its history?
MGM: I was first surprised, and then quickly frustrated and then almost amused—as I write about a bit in the book itself—by how many patterns repeat in the history of the subject. I write about a sense of cultural amnesia—how there will be really strong ideas for implementing sex ed, a strong plan for it, then debates, then protests, then pushback, then things calm down—and then a decade or so later, the whole thing starts up again. It’s not always so linear or on a specific timeline, but the pattern is there and it’s dizzying. And the protest/debate/pushback is almost never about a specific topic. Not really. It’s just much more about the idea of sex ed, with different topics functioning as the bogeyman of the day.
That was most surprising on a narrative level, but on a content level, I was really surprised by the utter vitriol the religious right had for the subject during the late 1960s, especially 1968 and 1969. There were books, pamphlets, radio shows . . . the John Birch Society had a secondary group specifically dedicated to fighting sex ed. Several states banned the subject, with Louisiana functionally banning it for an entire decade from 1961 to 1971.
BP: Why is sex education in the US still so inconsistent and controversial, despite decades of public health data that would support its implementation?
MGM: Because of the way the religious right—which is an imperfect term, but the one I use to refer to Christian conservative political movements—has worked tirelessly to portray it as being inconsistent and ineffective; and because those political machinations have been so powerful on the national, state, and local levels; and because of the deep held belief that many have that any knowledge of sex is bad or dangerous or not appropriate for young people; and because sex ed is not mandated or overseen on a national level. It really is a perfect storm.
BP: What are some of the most common myths or misconceptions people have about sex ed in schools?
MGM: One of the most important things to understand is that not all sex ed is created equal, and that is because there are two main schools of thought around sex ed that have wildly different goals, which leads to wildly different content. So, a high school junior in New Hampshire and a high school junior in Alabama could both say they took, for example, a calculus class. While they may not have learned from the exact same textbook and done the exact same problems, in theory, the classes should have covered the same content. Same even for a course like English. Even if students across the country didn’t read the same books or were assigned the same essays, the goal, ideally, was to read, write, and think.
With sex ed, on the other hand, a young person in one state could receive comprehensive sex ed (CSE) that is evidence based, medically accurate, age appropriate, and inclusive. A young person in another state could receive abstinence-only or “sexual risk avoidance” “sex ed” that is shame based, biased, does not give information about contraception, and isn’t inclusive. Both of these young people may technically have been taught “sex ed,” but in this example, they are actually philosophically diametrically opposed and could contain almost none of the same material.
This makes it extremely hard to talk about “sex ed” in general, and so this underlying tension really has to be understood before any work can be done in improving sex ed in schools.
BP: How did the religious right become so influential in shaping sex ed policy across the country?
MGM: This is such a complicated question, and there isn’t an easy answer. I think there are a few different big points.
The first is that the early concepts of sex ed, found in social hygiene circles, were really born of a partnership between medicine and what was thought of broadly as “morals,” which in the early 1900s among “proper society” often just translated to a bland sort of Protestantism. And so within that, there was this strongly held belief that the problem of “the social evil,” (which social hygienists were trying to cure) which included sexually transmitted infections, was solved by both medicine and morals and that that advice was actually the same: don’t have sex until you get married; get married young; and then only have sex with that person. So, there was and is some ownership over the idea of sex ed from “Christianity” in a broad sense.
But as the century proceeded and medicine and science began to offer different solutions, prevention, and treatment, a gulf began to form. Then there are all those whims and moments of history that I can’t enumerate or attempt to establish strong causal relationships between, but the mid-1960s were such a tumultuous time in our country in so many areas. And then, by the late 1960s, I do think for the Christian hegemony, which had spent many decades feeling really unchallenged, everything appeared to be a threat. We see this on a lot of levels in areas I am not an expert in—but race, economics, etc., and certainly in sexual politics. And sex ed, which was also progressing as its own field of study, now with the backdrop of a new morality, became a target by what was emerging as “the religious right.”
Then, through varied political actions (local, state, and national laws, lawsuits, etc.), that machine of the religious right weakened and demonized good and comprehensive sex ed and strengthened the appearance of abstinence-only sex ed. It was really a very good scheme and allowed states to fulfill mandates for “sex education” while really just providing abstinence instruction. And it was done relatively quietly, so many people really just don’t know that this is the situation.
Read part two.
About the Author
Margaret Grace Myers is a writer, an educator, and a book collector based in Maine. Her writing has appeared in The Cut, Lady Science, and the Gotham Gazette, among other publications. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Goucher College and a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of The Fight for Sex Ed.
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