Touchy Subject: The History and Philosophy of Sex Education by Lauren Bialystok and Lisa M. F. Andersen, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022

The aptly named Touchy Subject marks the latest installment in the History and Philosophy of Education Series (University of Chicago Press). Each book in this series is co-authored by a historian and a philosopher, who bring their distinctive disciplinary approaches to a challenging topic in education. In this case, co-authors Lauren Bialystok and Lisa M. F. Andersen tackle the always delicate subject of sex education with admirable clarity and scholarly insight. The first half of Touchy Subject dissects the history of sex education in the United States from the late 19th century to the dawn of the new millennium. The broad contours of this roughly 120-year timeline will be familiar to readers of other historical studies of sex education in the US (see Freeman, 2008; Irvine, 2004; Luker, 2007; Moran, 2002; Zimmerman, 2002). Key periods and developments covered include the Victorian era conspiracy of silence that early sex education advocates sought to overcome; the progressive era push among so-called social hygienists and social purity reformers to integrate sex education into a rapidly expanding system of public schooling; the mid-century emergence of family life education (FLE), with its emphasis on preparing students to occupy traditional gender roles as well as find happiness and fulfillment in marriage and the nuclear family; the late-1960s backlash against sex education, spearheaded by anti-communist and Christian conservative organizations; and the channelling of billions of dollars of federal funds, beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the present day, for abstinence-only-until-marriage education (AOUME). A common theme emerging from the history recounted here is that the interests and concerns of some groups – poor, working class, non-White women; the LGBTQ+ community; youth in general – have been consistently sidelined, if not completely ignored or forgotten, as advocates with different social and political agendas have left their imprint on school-based sex education. The Protestant social purity reformers of the late 19th century, as Touchy Subject points out, championed premarital chastity without considering whether all women wanted to live up to this middle-class social expectation. The family life educators of the mid-20th century promoted heterosexual dating beginning in junior high school as a way for youth to develop a “marriageable personality.” In so doing, they overlooked that some young women – middle-class women of colour in particular – were particularly vulnerable to stigmatization and abuse in a context in which frequent dating was encouraged and normalized. They also projected the era’s heteronormative domestic ideals onto all youth without considering individuals’ unique desires and life goals. To cite another example closer to the present day, since early in the Reagan presidency, the US government has aggressively funded AOUME both domestically and in developing countries despite clear and mounting evidence that it is woefully ineffective at achieving its primary goals, and harmful insofar as it withholds vital health information from its recipients. Indeed, recent studies indicate that almost all Americans have sex before marrying, and teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection (STI) rates in the US are among the highest in the industrialized world (CDC, 2019; Finer, 2007; Guttmacher Institute, 2015, 2019). Some intriguing research of primary source material animates the first half of Touchy Subject, including an examination of mid–20th-century sex education textbooks. These textbooks are notable for the scant attention they pay to venereal disease and teenage pregnancy prevention – a major preoccupation of the earlier social hygiene movement, as well as contemporary sex education. Evidently, the omissions were intentional, as the Freud-influenced sex education proponents of the time rejected the earlier fixation on syphilis, gonorrhea, and out-of-wedlock births, which they equated with “a myopic and distorted variety of …