Chapter Four:

Sex Education, the Sexual Revolution, and the Sixties

Kristin Luker
JSP/Sociology
(not for citation or quotation without permission)

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 Almost everyone in this book takes for granted that a cultural watershed

known as the sixties happened, and that a (or as they typically call it the ) sexual

revolution was what made it a watershed rather than just another decade. Over

and over again, people would bring up “the sixties” as a time when the world

changed forever. One mother in Billingsley, a community where a fight over

sex education was slowly inching towards an uneasy truce, put it in ways that

everyone in this book would understand, if not necessarily agree with:

I mean, you know, I get shocked every year. I got shocked when we had
a sixth grader sitting there pregnant. I got shocked when my daughter
had two pregnant girls in her class this year. I got even more shocked
when we were at a basketball game and this little girl had this little girl
and, I made the presumption that it was her sister and I was saying,
"Honey, you have a cute little sister," and she's going, "This is my baby."
It scares you to death. Especially when you have a daughter. It really
scares you. And, see, kids are not like they were when we were coming
up, anyway. ... we came through, or I'll say I came through the "love
child" and "flower power" and your parents threatened your life because
they wanted you not to be a part of that. Everybody was going crazy,
kids were growing hair down to their ankles, you know, these were weird
people, they need to be locked up, you know (laugh). Women were out
burning their bras in public, you know, and so it was like taboo for these
people. But nowadays, it's like, the kids know more than I knew when I
was twenty years old. (mother, Billingsley)

This mother and other people confronting painful fights over sex

education are clear that there was a sexual revolution in this country, and that

“the sixties”, at least when they talk to me, is a shorthand way of talking about

it. They would be surprised, I suspect, to know that it has taken many years for

sociologists and demographers to agree with them on both of these points: that

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there was a sexual revolution and that it started in the 1960s. Over the years

since “the sixties” happened, there has been a lively debate among academics as

to whether or not there ever was such a thing as a “sexual revolution” in this

country, and if there was, when it happened. Some scholars think that the

period described in the last chapter, the early years of the 20th century, was the

real upheaval in our sexual history, and that everything after that—including

the sixties--- were mere aftershocks.1 On the exact opposite side of the debate

are the scholars and other observers who think not only was there a sexual

revolution in the 1960s, but that it set in motion new and ferocious “culture

wars.” To hear this side talk about it, the sexual revolution and its aftermath

have come to pit religious fundamentalists and middle Americans against

sophisticated urbanites across a whole range of issues, not just sex.2

Interviewing people across the country and examining as many sex

education curricula as I could find for the period from the early 1900s to the

present, it’s easy to make the case that at a minimum people thought there was a

sexual revolution in the 1960s, and sex education accordingly changed both its

1
Albert D. Klassen, Colin J. Williams, Eugene E. Levitt, Hubert J. O'Gorman, and Alfred C. Kinsey
Institute for Sex Research. Sex and Morality in the U.S. : An Empirical Enquiry under the Auspices of the
Kinsey Institute. 1st ed. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Scott Stoessel, “The Sexual
Counter-Revolution”, The American Prospect, Phillips Cutright. "The Teenage Sexual Revolution and the
Myth of an Abstinent Past." Family Planning Perspectives 4, no. 1 (January) (1972): 25-29.
2
James Davison Hunter. Culture Wars : The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1991.
Christopher Eillison and Mark Musick, “Southern Intolerance: A Fundamentalist Effect.” Social Forces,
72: 379-98. James Davison Hunter. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic
Books, 1991.For an overview and a rebuttal (but one congruent with the argument being made here) see
Paul DiMaggio, John Evans, and Bethany Bryson. "Have Americans' Social Attitudes Become More
Polarized?" American Sociological Review 102, no. 3 (1996): 690-755.

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goals and focus. But my interviews with people about sex education convince

me of something more, that there really was a sexual revolution in this country,

and that it’s one of the great unacknowledged forces shaping much of

contemporary social and political life.

Just as the turn of the twentieth century saw profound changes in how

Americans thought about sex and family, a first sexual revolution so to speak,

the 1960s too, were a time of such unsettling change that they comprised a

second revolution.3 The sexual revolution of the 1960s was part of larger

changes in American society, as the mother in Billingsley points out. A great

many things from hairstyles, to clothing, to when and how people had babies

changed in the wake of it. Those people who argue that the sixties set in

motion a “culture war” are on to something, but as so often happens in

America, the sex part seems to have gotten lost in all the excitement. Talking

to people in their communities around the nation about the sex education of

their children leads me to believe that most of the culture war is about sex, and

that all these other issues—clothing, “teenage pregnancy,” “family values,”

“special rights” for gay people--are different ways of talking about the same

thing.

, James Davison Hunter. Culture Wars : The Struggle to Define America. New York: BasicBooks, 1991.
3
. Arlene S. Skolnick compares these changes to an earthquake. Embattled Paradise : The American
Family in an Age of Uncertainty. New York: Basic Books, 1991. I particularly like Skolnick’s point that
while earthquakes are unpredictable, they happen across pre-existsing faultlines.

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 Scholars disagree about whether or not there was a sexual revolution in

the 1960s because they use different meanings of the word “revolution”. The

word comes to us with a number of different meanings, and it depends on

which one is in play when people decide that there was or wasn’t a sexual

revolution in this country, and, if there was, when it happened.

In earlier times the word revolution simply meant change and flux, a

sense of things coming and going, as when we speak of the earth making

“revolutions” around the sun. Because it’s the most archaic sense of the word,

it’s not used very often to talk about the history of sex in America at least

directly, but it shows up with reasonable frequency as a background

assumption about what isn’t happening. That is, some observers seem to think

that either sex has to stay exactly the same over time, or change in some

predictable and linear way.

But sex, like every other part of American life, seems to have its

fashions, going through periods of both stability and flux. Although the data

are scanty enough to make full conclusions impossible, all of things we look at

as measures of changes in sex---marriage rates, divorce rates, out-of-wedlock

rates, reported rates of premarital sex and homosexual sex, attitudes towards

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sexual matters, all seem to move in different directions at different times in

American history.4

Exactly what these movements mean is not entirely clear, at least to me.

It could mean that Americans move somewhat randomly through periods of

sexual conservatism and sexual liberalism; it could mean that the data are just

too scanty to draw conclusions, or it could mean that there are slow-moving

changes in the meaning of sex that reflect changes in the powerful and

interconnected “big ticket” forces of social life—the economy, technology, the

changing relationship between men and women and the like.5 These changes,

though profound, are too subtle and too on-going to warrant any notion of

“revolution” in the more common senses of the word. Clearly, sex being the

private matter it is, it pays to be cautious, and the further back in history we go,

the more cautious it pays to be

That said, as we look over the long sweep of the admittedly limited

scanty data we have about sexual behaviors and attitudes, it’s also the case that

4
Daniel Scott Smith and Michael S. Hindus,” Premarital Pregnancy in America, 1640-1971: An Overview
and Interpretation”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History v. 4 (Spring, 1975): 537-570; of course, these
data may simply reflect the changing abilities of families to force erring couples to marry, but in terms of
the argument I am making here, that still reflects changes in “constraints on sex”
5
I hope I have made clear that I think that the relationship of these “big ticket” items and sexuality and the
relationships between men and women are best thought of as a spider web, where each strand affects the
others when jostled. I simply don’t think that cultural changes drive “material” ones or vice versa in any
kind of a simple way, as I hope this book makes abundantly clear. New external environments create new
challenges for both individuals and for societies, both individuals and societies come up with new systems
of meaning (“culture”) to engage with these changes, and having created a system of meaning, use that
system of meaning as a template to make sense of and change the world around them. Even this overview
somehow suggests that changes in the environment are fundamentally “prior”, but I don’t believe that.
Again as I hope this book shows, it’s an ongoing dance with many moves and counter-moves. Still,
analytically, one has to start somewhere…

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these periods of random or slow-moving change are also interspersed with

periods of rapid change so dramatic that the people living through them

experience them as sharp breaks with what went before.

Which brings us to the second meaning of revolution, the one that came

into vogue in the years after the French Revolution of 1789. This one means a

radical restructuring of the status quo, and this sense of the word there have

been at least two sexual revolutions, the one that gave birth to sex education,

and the sixties, which began a fight over the meaning of it.

In both periods sexual behavior and sexual attitudes changed quite

rapidly, and everyday people confronted visible evidence everywhere they

looked. My grandmother wore floor length skirts and a flowing “Gibson Girl”

pompadour; by the time she was forty, young women around her were wearing

rolled stockings, shockingly short skirts and bobbed, “mannish” hair. Most

alarmingly, these young women, many of them from her same social class and

background, were kissing boys (in public!), permitting even more personal

intimacies in private, smoking, drinking, and were dancing in ways that seemed

the essence of abandon.

Changes were just as radical in the 1960s. Going into the decade, a

sexual regime based on the fruitful and multiplying married couple was the

order of the day. Contraception was illegal and so was abortion. Contraceptive

clinics existed, but a combination of local mores and Federal (as well as some

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state) laws meant that they were typically low-key and served only married

couples, and at least two states had no contraceptive clinics whatsoever. 6 The

most common contraceptive (marital, course) was the condom, followed by

withdrawal and douching. While upper income families were using the

diaphragm, most Americans were using virtually the same kinds of

contraception as a century earlier.7 Even more telling, although subsequent

studies made clear that even in 1961 forty percent of women were sexually

active before marriage, no one knew, because asking unmarried women about

their sexual practices was deemed unthinkable. 8

Other, more subtle measures also made clear that the United States on

the eve of the 1960s was an almost unrecognizably different country from the

one that we now take for granted because of the primacy granted to both

marriage and procreation. Masturbation was still known as self-abuse in many

circles, and homosexuality was so distant from public acknowledgement that

6 David J. Garrow. Liberty and Sexuality : The Right to Privacy and the Making of RoeV. Wade. New
YorkToronto: Macmillan Pub. Co. ;
7 Charles Goodyear vulcanized (added sulphur to and heated) rubber in 1839, but obtained a patent for the
process in 1841. Vulcanized rubber is stronger and more durable, and relatively impervious to heat and
cold. Within a decade, this new material was being used for contraceptive devices in the form of
inexpensive condoms, diaphragms, and bulb syringes used for douching. In addition, Americans used
withdrawal and the rhythm method (periodic abstinence), this latter method hampered by the fact that it
took until the 1930s for science to ascertain that the fertile period in women was in the middle of the cycle
rather than during the menses, as is the case with other mammals.
8
In all fairness, researchers began asking unmarried women in select subpopulations what contraceptives
they were using in the mid 1970s. But except for women who had already borne a child out of wedlock,
the only national survey of the era (the National Survey of Family Growth) did not ask unmarried women
about their sexuality until 1982. Data on premarital sex are from Singh, S. and J. E. Darroch (1999).
"Trends in Sexual Activity Among Adolescent American Women: 1982-1995." Family Planning
Perspectives 31( 5): 212-219.

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the idea that it was a “lifestyle” that one could choose, as opposed to a disease

that one tried to cure, would have been unimaginable to all concerned. 9 Even

the founding mothers and fathers of what were then called “homophile”

organizations wanted only an end to discrimination, not affirmative acceptance

of their orientation. 10

Getting pregnant outside of marriage was so shameful that women who

did so (at least white women who did so) were sent out of sight, counseled to

give their babies up for adoption and told to resume “normal” life as quickly as

possible.11 (In 1970, an unwed mother in liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts

decided to flout convention and keep her baby; she was fired from her job and

found that diaper services refused to deliver to her house when they learned

she was unmarried.) Even men could feel the pressure: pharmacists reported

that it was customary in an earlier era not to sell condoms to young men whom

they knew to be unmarried.12

9 To get a sense of this other world, one need only to read any of the gay coming of age novels that have
appeared in the last few years, e.g. Edmund White. A Boy's Own Story. 1st ed. New York: Dutton, 1982.
and Edmund White, Farewell Symphony
10 John D'Emilio. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities : The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the
United States, 1940-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
11
Kunzel, R. G. (1993). Fallen women, problem girls : unmarried mothers and the professionalization of
social work, 1890-1945. New Haven, Yale University Press.; Solinger, R. (1992). Wake up little Susie :
single pregnancy and race in the pre-Roe v. Wade era. New York, Routledge.
12
Anonymous, “In Trouble: The Story of an Unwed Woman’s Decision to Keep Her Child” Atlantic,
March, 1970. Along the same lines, see “Single Motherhood”, Time, September 6, 1971 and “Unmarried
Parent: Is Martha Doing Right?” Senior Scholastic, October, 1972, p. 101. Interview with pharmacist
activist, 1984. Because unmarried motherhood had taken on distinctly racial tones by the 1980s and
became linked to the new social problem of “the underclass”, the social meaning of unmarried mothers
positions became, I believe, more controversial as the decade wore on. (I have made this argument
specifically with respect to Black unmarried mothers in Dubious Conceptions, pp. **, but for relevant
material see: ***.) And of course, by 1979, Dan Quayle, in his famous “family values” speech, castigated

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 By 1975, just a few short years later, that world had ended almost

completely. Contraception was legal for the unwed and even for teenagers; it

was even over the counter, and regularly advertised in mass-circulation

women’s magazines. Condoms, contraceptive jellies, foams, and sponges were

openly for sale on grocery store shelves. Abortion was legal as a right accorded

to women based on a constitutional theory of privacy, and daring movie stars

were proudly flaunting their unwed motherhood.

Which brings us to the third meaning of revolution, also from the

French Revolution. With its radical new notions of the rights of man, the

French Revolution came to stand for the redistribution of power, and the

replacing of one (implicitly unjust) regime with another, (implicitly more

equitable) one.13 Like the meaning of the word revolution just above, this

meaning, too, implies a total restructuring of everyday life. But what

distinguishes it from the previous meaning is the idea that life has changed so

dramatically because the revolution has called into question the fundamental power

relations on which everyday life is built. Thus how people addressed one another in

the French Revolution, or how months came to be named or years counted,

Murphy Brown for having had a child out of wedlock. In this context, see Charles Murray, “The Coming
White Underclass”, The Wall Street Journal.
13
Raymond Williams, Keyword: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Rev. Edition). 1983, New York:
Oxford University Press. See also Norberto Bobbio, and Allan Cameron. Left and Right : The Significance
of a Political Distinction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

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stood in for a set of political claims about the nature of society and how it

should be organized.14

It is in this sense of the word that the sexual revolution of the 1960s was

so revolutionary, because it called into question a set of taken-for-granted ideas

in the realm of gender and in sexuality, and in so doing, it also called into

question power relations between men and women. Whether or not the sexual

revolution intended to challenge the power relations between the sexes, and

whether or not it actually did, are still open questions. For my own part, let

me just say that I think that much of the sexual revolution was accidental,

(which is probably true of the French Revolution as well), and that it certainly

did not create equality—no matter how that term is defined—between men

and women.

But it did equalize men and women in at least one significant respect. By

1975 that most cherished ideal of the first generation of sex educators had

begun to come true: men and women had started to share a single standard of

sex behavior.15 Alas for the social hygienists like Anna Garlin Spencer, it wasn’t

the one they had in mind. In fact, the standard that emerged was the very one

that she had so confidently predicted would never happen; women began to

14 Lynn Avery Hunt. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, Studies on
the History of Society and Culture ; [1]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
15
This is not to say that the double standard has entirely disappeared, of course, because there is a
considerable amount of evidence to the contrary. What has changed, however, are the sharp edges of the

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conduct their sex lives in much the same way that men did. And both law and

social policy seemed bent on helping them do so.

It’s this part of the revolution that the mother in Billingsley is referring

to and that all of the people in this book are fighting over in one way or

another. The debate over sex education is as passionate as it is because it is a

fight over whether men and women can (and should) treat sex the same way.16

On the purely practical level, between 1964 and 1975 sex became

possible for millions of women in the ways it always had been for many men,

something you did when you wanted to, because you wanted to, and for its

own sake. With contraception legal, readily available, Federally-subsidized, and

highly effective, and with abortion available as a back-up should pregnancy

occur anyway, sex for pure pleasure became possible as a cultural ideal for

women, as it had been for men.

And keep in mind that sex without the consequences of pregnancy

(optional motherhood being one huge step closer to reproductive equality than

an earlier generation’s “voluntary motherhood”), occurred just as a new wave

of feminism was taking place. Not only had the link between sex and

double standard. in terms of the argument I will be making below, both the gradual decline of the
(heterosexual) double standard and the rise of more open homosexuality were both products of
16 Incidentally, whether or not the first sexual revolution, the one considered in the previous chapter, was
this third kind of a revolution is much debated by scholars. There is a considerable amount of evidence to
suggest that it was, but the kinds of data I would need to make a convincing claim just aren’t available to
me. What I do have are data about the sexual revolution of the 1960s, especially as it reverberates through
the lives of the people in the four communities studied in this book. So although I am pretty confident that

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reproduction been broken technologically, the women’s movement made the

political claim that this was just as it should be. After all, hadn’t parenthood

always been optional in some sense for men, and especially for unmarried men?

All of the indicators suggested that along several different measures, men

and women were now more alike than different in terms of their sexual

practices

As men and women became reproductively and then sexually more

similarly situated, so to speak, in an odd sort of way it created at least the space

for women to become what liberalism had always claimed that they were,

namely free and equal individuals, different in no essential way from the men

around them. Heretofore, in different ways and in varying degrees, biology (or

at least biology as it had been politically and socially structured) meant that

women were always, as Susan Moeller Okin so persuasively points out, mothers

or potential mothers.

Thus the watershed of the sexual revolution. Women, whose ties to

motherhood were loosened by it, started to become individuals.17 And public

opinion seemed to be largely accepting of the changes. Not only did American

the early years of the 20th century represented this kind of revolution, I will restrict myself to the more
recent revolution of the 1960s
17
Simone de Beauvoir; The Second Sex, ; Mary Ryan in Craig J. Calhoun. Habermas and the Public
Sphere, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.
.

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attitudes towards many sexual matters change as behavior was changing, these

changes in attitude diffused quite rapidly among different sectors of society..18

As the pollster Daniel Yankelovitch put it:

Those first few years of the decade of the 1970s point to vast changes in
the complexion and outlook of an entire generation of young people.
Indeed, so startling are the shifts in values and beliefs between the late
1960s, when our youth studies were first launched, and the present time
that social historians of the future should have little difficulty in
identifying the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. Rarely
has a transition between one decade and the next seemed so abrupt and
so full of discontinuities.19

The key discontinuity brought into being by “the sixties” was the gradual

displacement of marriage as the only legitimate place to have sex. Public

opinion polls show quite convincingly that as of 1967, a set of rules about

proper sexual conduct that would have seemed both comforting and familiar to

people in the early 1900s were still widely accepted by just about everyone, but

that the majority of the public had changed its mind on these rules before Roe v.

Wade. Whatever people did in their private lives, these polls show that as of

the late 1960s, they pretty much agreed about what people should do. Moral

people, in this view, and specifically moral women did not have sex before

18
Again, I won’t take on task of dating the exact beginning and end, if there was one, of the sexual
revolution. Sufficient to my purposes is to argue that there was one.
19
Daniel Yankelovitch, The New Morality: A Profile of American Youth in the 1970s, New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1974, p. Edward Leroy Long, Jr., “The History and Literature of “The New Morality,”” in The
Situation Ethics Debate, ed. Harvey Cox, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968. Arnold Lunn and Garth
Lean, The New Morality, London: Blandford Press, 1964. See Chapter 7 for “The Surrender on Sex.” For
empirical evidence of the spread of changing sexual standards as the core of the “new morality”, see

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marriage, did not have sex with anyone other than their legal spouses, and did

not have sex just for the sheer fun of it.

What is remarkable in retrospect is how quickly that world was

overturned. In 1969, almost seven of ten Americans were opposed to

premarital sex; by 1973, just four years later, that number had dropped to only

forty-eight percent of those surveyed, a drop of twenty percentage points. The

number who found nude photos in magazines offensive dropped a similar

twenty points, from seventy-five percent to fifty-five percent, and the number

of people who found topless waitresses offensive dropped seventeen points.20

Between 1965 and 1974, the number of people who thought birth control

information should be available to anyone who wanted it increased ten

percentage points, from eighty-one percent to ninety one percent.21 Even

attitudes towards abortion became substantially more liberal, with virtually of

the change occurring before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973.22

Changes of this magnitude are extremely rare in public opinion

surveying, a process which has now been taking place for approximately sixty

years. The sheer size of the shift in opinion and the very short time frame in

20 . For both questions, see Gallup Polls numbers 780, 874. For and overview see Benjamin I. Page, and
Robert Y. Shapiro. The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992.
21 Ibid
22
In the ten years between 1962 and 1972 there was a change of thirty percentage points in the numbers of
Americans who thought that poverty was a legitimate reason for having an abortion; between 1965 and
1972 there was a twenty-point percentage change in people who thought that a potentially serious birth
defect was. For an overview, see Page and Shapiro, pp. 104-108 [Page, 1992 #2]

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which it took place makes clear that the people in this book are on to

something when they see “the sixties” as a watershed.

Equally interesting is what did not change. Attitudes towards

extramarital sex wobbled a bit during the period, but most of the fluctuation

was occasioned by the fact that opinions towards extramarital sex became more

conservative rather than more liberal during the 1980s. Although some of the

variation comes about from the different wording of the questions asked, still,

during most of the 1970s and 1980s 70% of those surveyed thought that

extramarital relations were always wrong.23

By the same token, pollsters seem not to have asked many questions

about homosexuality before the early 1970s, but attitudes towards it were quite

stable through the 1970s and 1980s as well with a similar seventy to seventy-

five percent of those surveyed agreeing that same-sex relations were “always

wrong”, counterbalanced by some shift in sentiments that while “wrong”,

homosexuality should not be criminal. 24

Although the contradictory direction of public opinion on adultery and

gay sex would seem to challenge the idea that the 1960s represented a true

sexual revolution, if we go back to the third meaning of revolution, these

23
For ease of citation, rather than listing the individual polls, I have listed where they can
most conveniently be compared. See Page and Shapiro, op. cit. and Richard G. Niemi,

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findings make perfect sense. What was being redistributed in the sexual

revolution was the right for women to have heterosexual sex and not be

married. Thus marriage became one way that heterosexuals could be sexual,

but not the only one. When marriage was finally entered into, however, both

men and women expected that the boundaries of that sexual choice would be

respected.

Another way of thinking of it is the first sexual revolution dethroned

reproduction from its pre-eminent role in human sexuality, and put it on an

equal footing with sexual pleasure. But as the social hygienists so presciently

understood, valuing sexual pleasure per se raised troubling questions of

whether or not sexual pleasure was going to go its own way. If sex and

reproduction could be severed from each other within marriage, what was to

stop people from simply having sex without bothering to get married?

Happily for the worries of the social hygienists, a variety of social forces

kept sex within marriage—more or less---for much of the 20th century. But for

whatever reasons—and the exact reasons are still debated--sometime in the

middle of the 20th century, sex and marriage parted ways, just as sex and

procreation within marriage had in an earlier revolution..

Mueller, and Tom W. Smith. Trends in Public Opinion: A Compendium of Survey Data.
New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.
24
. Again, see Niemi et al., pp. 193-195

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 This second revolution was at first hidden because the categories of

thinking inherited from the first sexual revolution hid its emergence. The first

sexual revolution gave us the terms “premarital” sex and “out of wedlock”

births, and well into the 1980s, most people--including most social scientists--

continued to take those categories for granted. In an earlier era, this made

sense: for many of the people involved (particularly among the well-educated

and affluent), “pre-marital” was exactly that: if the Kinsey studies are any

indication, most women prior to the 1950s had “premarital” sex only with their

fiancées and only for a period of time leading up to the wedding. “Premarital”

sex was engagement sex, starting the sexual part of the marriage before the

legal part, a pattern that probably has deep roots in American history.25

But a new cultural ideal emerged in the 1960s: Men and women came to

believe that (heterosexual) sex outside of marriage was morally acceptable as

long as people cared for each other, even if they were not engaged to each

other.26

When pioneering feminist doctor Rachel Yarros wrote in 1933 that:

Many young people believe in pre-marital sex experience. Even those

who do not accept the free love doctrine, and who protest that they

25
As late as 1964 in the conservative Midwest, a fraternity pin (the pre-engagement symbol) and the
engagement ring alike were referred to by men as “crotch keys”, suggesting the wide acceptance of this
model of “premarital” sex.
26 Donald Porter Geddes, and Alfred C. Kinsey. Seeds of the American Sexual Revolution : Discussions of
the Studies of Alfred Kinsey. s.l.: s.n., 1975.; Ira L. Reiss. Premarital Sexual Standards in America; a
Sociological Investigation of the Relative Social and Cultural Integration of American Sexual Standards.
Glencoe, Ill.,: Free Press, 1960.

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 believe in marriage and expect to marry, argue that meanwhile they have
a right to occasional indulgences. They do not see why society should
object to this degree of freedom, provided there are not children. The
demand for contraceptive information on the part of college student,
male and female, and even of high- school pupils, is extraordinary, and
would appall the complacent, conservative parents of those emancipated
insurgents.27

she was chronicling the first sexual revolution.

When sex educators bewailed the idea that students thought that they

had nothing to learn from sex educators, they were chronicling the second.

Thus the seeming inconsistencies in the public opinion data. Starting

sometime in the 1960s, young people (and subsequently older ones) began to

think of heterosexual marriage as just one among many possible heterosexual

lifestyles. Thus the “single woman” and the “man about town” both became

culturally-accepted ways of being both single and sexually active. The

continuing resistance to adultery and homosexuality, however, suggests that

individuals may think that once one chooses a [heterosexual] lifestyle such as

marriage, one should honor the commitment

This change was so dramatically different from earlier forms of morality

that it was in fact called “The New Morality”.28

27
Rachel Yarros, M.D. pp. 11-12
28 Robert Campbell, ed. New Morality or No Morality. New York City: The Bruce Publishing Company,
1969., Robert L. Cunningham, ed. Situationism and the New Morality, Contemporary Problems in
Philosophy. New York City: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970., Charles V. Dorothy. God Speaks out on the
New Morality. Pasadena, Calif.: Ambassador College Press, 1964., Lawrence Lipton. The Erotic Revolution
An Affirmative View of the New Morality. 1st ed. Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1965.
, Arnold Henry Moore Lunn, and Garth Lean. The New Morality. London,: Blandford, 1964.

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 Although the first public response to the “sexual revolution” and the

“new morality” was largely one of alarm, Americans became accustomed to the

new sexual lifestyles in remarkably quick order. (Many of the people you will

meet in the next chapter would say that Americans became “numbed” rather

than accustomed, but still the changes in attitudes were remarkable.)

What was once the terrain of a small, sophisticated minority of

Americans (the heirs of the Greenwich Village “Bohemians” whose radical

attitudes on sex were so roundly ignored by the social hygienists) became

mainstream. Starting out as values among youth and the highly educated, more

“permissive” values vis a vis sexual behavior spread within a remarkably short

period of time to the less well-educated and to older people.29

Already by 1969, for example, the college campus had become accepting

of what had earlier been called “casual” sex—two out of three students

surveyed found nothing morally troubling about it. Despite the fact that young

people who are not college-bound tend to be more socially conservative, by

just four years later, disapproval among this group dropped from almost 60%

of those polled to numbers much like those seen among college students. By

, Douglas A. Rhymes. No New Morality: Christian Personal Values and Sexual Morality. Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1964., Ernest Parkinson Smith, and A. Graham Ikin. Morality -- Old and New. Derby: Peter
Smith Ltd., 1964., Daniel Yankelovich. The New Morality; a Profile of American Youth in the 70's. New
York,: McGraw-Hill, 1974.
29 For the diffusion of these values from a small group of highly educated youth to a wider population, see
Yankelovitch, D. (1974). The New Morality: A Profile of American Youth in the 1970's. New York,
McGraw Hill. For changes within the larger population, see Page and Shapiro, op. cit, pp.104-110 and
Niemi et al. op. cit. pp. 187-214

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1973, substantial majorities of young people, whether in college or not, agreed

that they wanted more sexual freedom, that abortions were morally acceptable,

and so was gay sex was morally acceptable.30

Although less visible at the time, essentially the same thing began to

happen to childbearing. While the 1970s saw a national crisis over “teenage

pregnancy”, the behavior that was driving that crisis was not pregnancy but

birth, and not births to young people, but births to young unmarried people.31

By 1979, when Vice President Dan Quayle made his famous “family values”

speech denouncing the fictional Murphy Brown for having had a child out of

wedlock, non-marital childbearing had become even more a significant part of

all American births. By the year after his speech, Americans non-marital birth

rates had increased by almost 30% from 1960, just two decades earlier, and

non-marital births now accounted for almost one out of every four births. As a

point of comparison, out of wedlock rates have by now gone up one hundred

percent since 1980, and almost one baby out of three is born to unmarried

parents.

These figures, stark as they are, understate the changes just as the rates

on “premarital” sex did. Where in an earlier era, out of wedlock births

30
Yankelovitch,The New Morality, p024-24.
31
National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics Reprots, 50, (10), June 6, 2002

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represented miscalculations and accidents, in this new era they represent

reasonably conscious choices.32

What seems to be happening is that Americans (including those who are

having both sex and children “out of wedlock”) agree that marriage as a

location for sex and childbearing is valuable. Where they differ from earlier

generations is their belief that marriage is no longer the only choice for both sex

and parenthood. Thus many women and men feel comfortable with the idea

that they may well get married someday, when they meet Mr. or Ms. Right, but

in the meantime are willing to have sex and in many cases children while they

await that day.

As a key government document examining the shift to out of wedlock

childbearing primly notes, “ Two key factors contributing to the rising numbers

of out-of-wedlock births through 1990 were the increased birth rates for

unmarried women and the steep increases in the number of unmarried women

in the childbearing ages…In other words, the combination of more unmarried

women in the population and higher propensities for unmarried women to give

birth produced substantial increases in the number of out-of-wedlock births.”33

32
I use that awkward terminology to capture a complex reality: in earlier research I asked teen mothers
about events leading up to their pregnancies, and virtually all of them described the pregnancy as having
happened “accidentally.” Yet for most of them, the pregnancy happened after having had sex without
using contraception, and having actively chosen to not to have had an abortion, thus suggesting that while
there are cultural forces shaping how young, poor women describe their pregnancies, their actions tell
another story.
33 , Stephanie J Ventura, and Christine Bachrach. "Non-Marital Childbearing in the United States, 1940-
99." National Vital Statistics Reports 48, no. 16 (2000).p. 3

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 There you have it, hidden in the language of demographers. People are

substantially less willing to get married, are more willing to have sex when they

are not married, and are more willing to have children resulting from that sex.

This is the revolution: marriage has been dethroned.

Whatever the forces dethroning marriage, they are clearly happening

throughout all of the industrialized world, with the partial exception of Japan.

The Scandinavian countries, Great Britain, and France all have higher rates of

non-marital childbearing than we do; two out of three children in Iceland are

born to unmarried parents, half of all births in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

are non-marital, and approximately four out of ten births in France, Great

Britain, and Finland are unmarried.34

Sex education, which had come into being as a way of managing the first

sexual revolution, the one that separated sex from procreation within marriage

was now called on in a new incarnation as a way to manage this second one,

which had for the first time separated both sex and reproduction from

marriage. From a rather benign and diffuse set of programs scattered over

biology, English, home economics, and physical education, sex education was

now increasingly remade into exactly what the early founders had dismissed as

“emergency” sex education—sex education taught alone, designed to warn

34
Council of Europe, Recent Demographic Developments in Europe, 199, Council of Europe Pres, 1999.

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young people about the dangers of sex outside of marriage, or, in the new

incarnation, how to manage those dangers more effectively.

Implicit in the sexual revolution, and the changing standards of

especially female behavior, was the threatening idea that women and men—and

particularly women, the traditional guardians of the home--- were having sex

and children for their own reasons. Sex was no longer part of a courtship

process that would lead to a spiritualized eroticism that was designed to neatly

confine more entertaining, more satisfying sex within the bonds of marriage, as

social hygienists had hoped. Now sex was just another pleasure to be indulged

in whenever the two parties agreed.

Worse yet, although sex educators only recognized this in the context of

“teenage pregnancy”, these people who were having sex just for fun were

increasingly moving on to the next stage, building families without bothering to

go through the step of getting married.

Alert to the threat, a new generation of sex educators moved, once again,

to make sure that sex was safely tethered, if not in marriages, at least in

heterosexual, committed relationships that were part of the prelude to marriage.

And the language that sex educators used was one of “risk reduction.” Rather

than following in the footsteps of their predecessors, who urged young people

to abstain from non-marital sex entirely, the new generation of sex educators—

themselves the products of the sexual revolution—decided that both

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normatively and statistically, most young people would be having sex outside of

marriage. In other words, they took for granted the core assumption of the

sexual revolution—that marriage was just one sexual lifestyle among many.

When Mary Calderone, M.D., founder of the Sex Information and

Education Council of the US (SIECUS) said, “One of the great issues of this

era is the question of how to reframe our moral values in terms relevant to the

needs and conditions of a world that grows more complex and demanding

every day” she could well have been writing in 1915. But her next sentences

makes clear she is speaking of the second rather than the first sexual revolution:

“[M]any of the moral dilemmas relate in one way or another to sexual behavior,

within, as well as outside marriage” (emphasis added.)35

The new sex educators gave less ground on childbearing, preferring to

see it as one of the “risks” of sex to be managed, rather than a conscious (albeit

often second-best) decision. Throughout this period, sex educators assumed

that teenage pregnancy was the same thing as unwed pregnancy, and true to an

earlier era, they assumed that it must be unwanted.

The “dangers” of sexuality therefore were no longer the syphilis and

“commercialized vice,” that worried the social hygienists (and even the family

life educators) but the “risks” inherent in this new cultural form of sex —

unwanted (although unwanted by whom was never clearly specified) pregnancy,

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abortion, and what were thought to be the relatively more benign diseases of

the 1970s—gonorrhea, herpes, and the less well-known sexually transmitted

diseases.

The task of sex education became one of reducing the risks of sexuality

outside of marriage among young people, and two things were thought critical

for such reduction. On the one hand, information was key: young people

could not manage risks without being aware both of the risks and the means to

reduce those risks. On the other hand, young people needed motivation to

manage such risks, and thus the emphasis on being in a “caring” relationship.

This gave rise to a new marker of when young people were “ready” to have sex.

In an earlier era, of course, they were “ready” to have sex when they had

married or, although few sex educators directly addressed it, when they were

engaged to be married and had publicly announced themselves to be so. Now,

they were “ready” when they were prepared to actively manage risks on their

own behalf and for their partners. A young person who did not protect his or

her partner from both pregnancy and disease was a person, by definition, “not

ready” to have sex. Finally, sex education de facto tried—as had the social

hygienists—to uphold an new ideal from further “slippage” into exactly what

happened—sex and parenthood largely outside the confines of marriage.

35
Mary S. Calderone, M.D. “Time: The Present”, SIECUS Newsletter, Vol. 3, Number 5, June, 1968, p.2

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 In the management rather than the deterrence of risk, sex educators

were in tune with a range of other cultural and social processes. Increasingly,

from crime to nuclear energy, the task of a more complex and heterogeneous

society was not the preaching of a moral vision as both the social hygienists

and the family life educators assumed, but the provision of information to

morally diverse actors who would “clarify” their own values, and act

prudently.36

The arrival of the Human Immuno-Deficiency Virus (HIV) and its

37
consequence, AIDS in the early 1980s put these assumptions into high relief.

Although Americans had undergone a heterosexual sexual revolution, they—like

the social hygienists before them—had not anticipated the logical flow of

events.

By the time of the discovery of the AIDS virus, gay activists had taken

the logic of sexual rights one step further. If heterosexuals were no longer

obligated to confine themselves sexually and reproductively to the nuclear

family, why should they? The expansion of the gay rights movement from an

anti-discrimination position to a gay pride position called the status of the

nuclear heterosexual family even more into question.

36
Ulrich Beck. Risk Society : Towards a New Modernity. London ; Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage
Publications, 1992.
37 Centers for Disease Control, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 30, 250-252; Centers for Disease
Control, Recommendations of the USPH Task Force on the Use of Viudine to Reduce Perinatal

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 AIDS education heightened the contradiction. While conservative critics

were using it to urge that heterosexual sex return to marriage, and that

homosexual sex be banned in order to protect gays from themselves, gay

activist groups produced “safe sex” educational materials that frankly combined

pleasure with risk reduction. While Federally-funded publications urged

(presumably heterosexual) teenagers to practice “safer” and “caring” sex, other

Federally-funded publications urged gay men to have “hot and healthy” sex. 38

Like their forebears, who assumed that everyone – working-class and

affluent; male and female; white, “Negro,” “Hebrew,” and “Slav” – could be

taught to follow the single standard of sex behavior, the new sex educators had

a new ideal. It was still the single standard, but this time it was the standard of

“intimacy”, of “caring” and “non-exploitative” sex that was the common goal

for all groups. By the time that AIDS educators were preaching “safe sex”

transmuted into “mutually monogamous sex” as the preferred ideal, it was

simply a more clinical rendering of the sex educators’ desideratum.36

But this new wave of sex education reform brought its own backlash in

its wake. In the course of trying to convince young people that the best kind of

sex was intimate, committed, and mutually caring sex, sex that took the other

Transmission of Human Immuno Deficiency Virus , Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reprot, 1994,43, RR-
11
38 Yankelovich, op. cit; I base this claim on the analysis of curricula examined from the 1930s to the
present. Cf that “safe sex” is the logical reduction of the “caring” relationship to its essential element: that
one cares enough to protect the other person from risk, even if the relationship is a transitory one.

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person into account, sex educators had effectively conceded that marriage was

just one of several sexual options.

This fact was not lost on opponents, who saw in this concession the

coming end of civilization. Starting in the 1960s the Christian Crusade and the

John Birch Society as well as other conservatives began to take on sex

education programs. In 1964, the Anaheim John Birch society, ardent

conservatives who looked on Barry Goldwater as too liberal, found the local

sex education program deeply offensive.39

Ironically, a program designed by its founders to counter tendencies

towards what they saw as “promiscuity” was accused by its opponents of

fomenting it. As a John Birch publication of 1968 notes, sex education

programs

…make sexual promiscuousness fashionable, marriage a temporary

convenience, divorce commonplace, chastity a joke, and fidelity a symbol
of backwardness. Encourage premarital sexual experiments and
relations, the unlimited use of contraceptives, and a widespread resort to
abortion. Make the abandonment of newborn babies to welfare agencies
a customary procedure. Convert the sexual act from its natural reproductive
function to solely a source of pleasure, without corresponding responsibility.
(emphasis added)40

With these words, the Birch Society acknowledged that a new era in sex

education had begun.

39 There is a journalistic but closely observed account of this controversy in Mary Breasted’s book: Mary
Breasted. Oh! Sex Education! New York,: Praeger Publishers, 1970.
40 John Birch Society Newsletter, p. 5

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 In 1968 the John Birch Society and the Christian Crusade, whatever their

relationships to sex education, were decidedly on the fringes (some would argue

the “lunatic” fringes) of American political debate. Yet opposition to sex

education, once the purview of what was called the “radical right, ” moved in

just a little over a decade to very much the center of the Republican Party, .

traditionally the more aristocratic party complete with a forgiving eye towards

sexual foibles, at least those committed in private?

The short answer is that just as was the case in the first sexual

revolution, changes in sexual practices got mapped over changes in gender as

well. What was a tiny minority of women in 1880-1920, became a groundswell

by the end of the century. [RM: education, work force etc.] Increasingly

women were—in terms of their daily life activities—more and more like their

brothers and husbands. What had once been a doctrine of separate spheres,

where women stayed home and tended to the family while men went out to

challenge the marker and wring a living from it, quietly came to an end.

Although the data are murky, it seems clear that many Americans appreciated

at some level that a new cultural ideal of marriage (and with it new cultural

ideals of masculine and feminine) had emerged, and that these new ideals

enjoyed widespread approval.

Despite the popularity of these new ideals, ideals that came to seem

“natural” to many Americans, in fact, the ideals served to polarize people.

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Whether the frame of contention was the family, feminism, proper roles and

activities for men and women, abortion or sex education, there were a

significant minority of people who clung to the ideals of an earlier era. In fact,

ironically, the ideals they clung to were in large part the ideals of the early social

hygienists—that men and women were equal but different, that parenthood

and particularly motherhood redeemed sexuality from mere carnality and

transformed it into a source of intimacy and commitment.

A variety of public issues, from the ill-fated Carter-era White House

Conference on Families, to abortion, to the ERA served to politically mobilize

those who supported an earlier model of families and sex. And, once

mobilized, they were eager to make their voices heard in the public arena. In

short, the sexual revolution of the 1960s, like the French Revolution some two

hundred years earlier, had given rise to a new form of conservative and liberal

in the political arena.

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