Susan Freeman's Sex Goes to School examines the rise of high-school sex education classes in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Her account is most compelling when she looks closely at three innovative programs: the city school districts of Toms River, New Jersey and San Diego, California, and the Oregon state public school system. The curricular materials and programs these schools produced, as well as the educational buzz they generated within scholarly journals and educational circles, make up the bulk of her evidence. The curriculums varied between the programs, with San Diego addressing bodily changes and reproduction more explicitly and New Jersey focussing on family relationships and the dynamics of dating. Despite these differences, professional educators praised each program for the ways in which they “invited frank discussion of dating, marriage, and sexuality in public school classrooms” (47). Educational materials like textbooks, films, and teacher class plans addressed important topics such as sexual anatomy, masturbation, sexual arousal, menstruation and reproduction, in single and co-ed settings.

The context and content of sex education classes warrant closer attention, Freeman argues, because knowledge about biological and psychological sexual development and the opportunity to discuss important questions with peers while in school empowered high-school students. Sex education classrooms gave students exposure to “democratic and gender-egalitarian principles” that Freeman suggests led them to form more equitable heterosexual arrangements. Girls in particular benefitted. Experiences in progressive, discussion-based and student-directed classrooms, Freeman writes, “induced girls to be self-reflective, pursue self-improvement, develop sexual subjectivity, and expect fairness in relationships” (xiii). She goes as far to say that such lessons translated into an overall “critique of male-dominated households” by sex and family life educators (150). Such apparent radicalism flew under the radar. The 1940s and 1950s sex education classroom was strikingly different from the classrooms of the 1970s and beyond when Christian conservatives targeted schools for teaching a view of sex at odds with their religious views. Implied in this trajectory is that progressive sex education in the 1940s and 1950s became a resource for the generational upheavals of the 1960s. Freeman concludes that the “gender consciousness instilled in girls by sex education and family living curricula in some ways enabled them to recognize their collective identity and gain awareness of gender inequality” (149).

Intriguing as these assertions are, there is little evidence to support them. There are few voices from students or parents in this history and little methodological sense of either group existing in dynamic and complex relationships with the broader culture outside schools. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan's didactic exposé of stifling Cold War heterosexuality, is surprisingly absent. Drawn heavily as it is from educational materials and programs, Sex Goes to School does not wade into the far more complex world of actual dating and mating, or engage enough with the cataclysmic transformations in sexuality that took place around sex education classrooms between 1930 and 1970.