Birds, Bees, and Venereal Disease: Toward an Intellectual History of Sex Education

At least since the enlightenment, sex education has been a part of the process by which children are guided into adulthood; think, for instance, of the elaborate care with which Rousseau formed Emile's developing passions. 1 But it is only in the past hundred years that mandatory state-sponsored schooling and steadily increasing enrollments of students past the age of puberty have created the possibility for sexual pedagogy on a mass level. The movement for sex education in the public schools [End Page 213] began in the second decade of the twentieth century, at the cultural moment when vocal public criticism of many social ills was paired with an equally articulate optimism about education's ability to effect their cure. In 1916, Maurice Bigelow, social hygienist and director of the School of Practical Arts at Columbia University Teacher's College, commented that "a large number of the most enlightened people" had recently