Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century
Most people assume that adolescence has always been around, but according to Moran (history, Univ. of Kansas), the concept didn't exist until G. Stanley Hall published Adolescence in 1904. That two-volume work dealt with "the special situation and needs of young people who had reached puberty but were still too young to marry"--i.e., with sex education. Moran shows how Victorian principles that shaped sexual ideology were slowly eroded by sex-education advocates. Margaret Sanger's crusade for birth control and the social hygiene movement ran up against the freedom unleashed at the end of World War I. The Roaring Twenties brought a revolution in manners and morals, along with an increase in sexually transmitted diseases. The resulting Chamberlain-Kahn Act also helped sex education get its foot in the door of public schools. Moran describes the family-based moral teaching of the 1950s and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, ending with a critique of the former and of current methods of sex education. This study deepens our understanding of a hot topic and should be considered seriously by most larger collections.-Terry A. Christner, Hutchinson P.L., KansasCopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.