Sex Goes to School by Susan K. Freeman

Author:Susan K. Freeman [Freeman, Susan K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, 20th Century, Social Science, Women's Studies, Education
ISBN: 9780252091285
Google: 18df8f7WQTkC
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2010-10-01T00:37:07+00:00

Heterosexuality and Gender Complementarity

Highlighting the virtues of femininity and masculinity, the differences between women and men, and male-female relationships, sex and family life curricula linked and reinforced gender and heterosexuality. Heterosexuality was not under siege during this period, but the parameters of normative heterosexuality were undergoing redefinition. The publication of the Kinsey reports, alarm about sexual “deviance” and juvenile delinquency, and rising divorce rates signaled a changing society in which sexuality appeared more mutable and transgressive than in the past.42 How could educators make heterosexuality attractive, but not too attractive, to young people?

Fundamental to educators’ understandings of sex differences was the union of male and female in marriage, a union that was both idealized and discussed in practical terms. The idea that marriage maximized the collaborative potential of complementary male and female traits was not unique to sex educators or to the era but reflected ideas in ascendance for decades past.43 Teaching this understanding of gender and marriage to captive audiences of adolescents and teenagers through public schools, however, was new. The rise in divorce rates during the mid-twentieth century did not lead sex and marriage experts to conclude that marriage was becoming obsolete. Rather, they considered it to be a formula for successful integration of male and female characteristics and personalities, successful only when both parties made an informed commitment to the relationship.44 Marriage was beleaguered in the mid-twentieth century, they thought, but not beyond recovery. By preparing young people for marriage, teachers encouraged students’ consciousness of male-female roles and differences. Whether the emphasis was on difference or compatibility, and whether the foundation for differences was biological or cultural, teachers heightened students’ attention to the significance of gender in adolescence and adulthood.

The contrast between male and female identities taught students to position themselves with their respective gender. Teaching devices geared toward mixed-gender classes, whether at the junior or senior high school level, tended to employ this comparative approach; the contrast appeared in visual representations and written (or spoken) terms. The first page of the adolescent development unit in the guide for family living from Detroit, Michigan, for instance, showed a boy and girl of high school age, holding hands. Exaggerating physical differences, art teacher Carl Owen’s line drawings feature a rectangular-shaped male torso and an hourglass female figure. The teens sport a jacket (his) and skirt (hers) of matching pattern, and both appear white-skinned and fair-haired. But the resemblance ends there. The girl’s waist is extremely narrow, but her shoulders, arms, legs, and buttocks are rounded; the male’s shoulders, arms, and legs are rendered in straight lines, with the jacket covering his buttocks. In a gentlemanly fashion he carries the books and papers. Her arm, a bangle bracelet around the wrist, extends away from her body, and she is empty-handed.

The curricula also emphasized increasing complementarity between boys and girls as they reached adulthood. One figure in Force’s Your Family, Today and Tomorrow renders the path toward marriage as one of growing compatibility, a progression illustrated by the image of a ladder.

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