The first comprehensive trade history of sex ed in American schools—and an impassioned call to reform sex ed into a powerful tool for reproductive justice and social equality
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 90s. Yet the majority of states require that sex education stress abstinence, and 22 states do not require sex ed in public schools at all.
In The Fight for Sex Ed, 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.
Because sex ed is not mandated at the federal level, these battles have played out locally throughout the decades: through rigged school boards, administrative oustings, court cases, unjust firings, scare tactics, and threats. Myers also shows how the religious right has worked to narrow the discourse around sex ed, often dictating the terms of debate almost entirely.
What we teach young people has serious ramifications for reproductive justice, LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality, and public health. Sex education lies at the intersection of these hugely important cultural forces, yet it has been largely invisible. This book illuminates its potential—and its power.
“A comprehensive and propulsive overview of the history of sex education . . . [N]ot just an admiring look at generations of dedicated advocacy but a strong call for changes to how the truth is reported in America.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Sex education is not just about sex, of course. It is a charged issue around which the Christian right has manufactured moral outrage for political gain. In great and compelling detail, The Fight for Sex Ed traces a century of these attacks and harms, revealing the lies, scandalous acts, misinformation, and tactics deployed everywhere from local school boards to the national stage—all of which feel eerily familiar today. Myers also tracks the work done by medical experts, citizens, teachers, and sex-education advocates to meet public health crises with fact-based information. The Fight for Sex Ed is an essential read for those who care about truth, justice, and the well-being of our youth.”
—Laura Pappano, author of School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education
“Informative, expansive, gravitational, and consuming. Myers has delivered an urgent, necessary, beautiful gift of a book at a moment in which we find ourselves desperate to devour it and to take its education with us into the fight for our lives and communities.”
—Hannah Matthews, author of You or Someone You Love: Reflections from an Abortion Doula