Reproductive Justice

This history of the U.S. Public Health Service's efforts to educate Americans about sex makes clear why federally funded sex education has been haphazard, ad hoc, and often ineffectual. Since launching its first sex ed program during World War I, the Public Health Service has dominated federal sex education efforts. Alexandra M. Lord draws on medical research, news reports, the expansive records of the Public Health Service, and interviews with former surgeons general to examine these efforts, from early initiatives through the administration of George W. Bush. Giving equal voice to many groups in America--middle class, working class, black, white, urban, rural, Christian and non-Christian, scientist and theologian--Lord explores how federal officials struggled to create sex education programs that balanced cultural and public health concerns. She details how the Public Health Service left an indelible mark on federally and privately funded sex education programs through partnerships and initiatives with community organizations, public schools, foundations, corporations, and religious groups. In the process, Lord explains how tensions among these organizations and local, state, and federal officials often exacerbated existing controversies about sexual behavior.

This authoritative, state-of-the-art Handbook provides an authoritative overview of issues within sexuality education, coupled with ground-breaking discussion of emerging and unconventional insights in the field. With 32 contributions from 12 countries it definitively traces the landscape of issues, theories and practices in sexuality education globally. Importantly, this Handbook does not equate sexuality education with safer sex education nor understand this subject as confined to school based programmes. Instead, sexuality education is understood more broadly and to occur in spaces as diverse as community settings and entertainment media, and via communication technologies. It is an essential and comprehensive reference resource for academics, students and researchers of sexuality education that both demarcates the field and stimulates critical discussion of its edges.

Curricula in U.S. public schools are often the focus of heated debate, and few subjects spark more controversy than sex education. While conservatives argue that sexual abstinence should be the only message, liberals counter that an approach that provides comprehensive instruction and helps young people avoid sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy is necessary. Caught in the middle are the students and teachers whose everyday experiences of sex education are seldom as clear-cut as either side of the debate suggests. Risky Lessons brings readers inside three North Carolina middle schools to show how students and teachers support and subvert the official curriculum through their questions, choices, viewpoints, and reactions. Most important, the book highlights how sex education's formal and informal lessons reflect and reinforce gender, race, and class inequalities. Ultimately critical of both conservative and liberal approaches, Fields argues for curricula that promote social and sexual justice. Sex education's aim need not be limited to reducing the risk of adolescent pregnancies, disease, and sexual activity. Rather, its lessons should help young people to recognize and contend with sexual desires, power, and inequalities.

Sex education, since its advent at the dawn of the 20th century, has provoked the hopes and fears of generations of parents, educators, politicians, and reformers. On its success or failure seems to hinge the moral fate of the nation and its future citizens. But whether we argue over condom distribution to teenagers or the use of an anti-abortion curriculum in high schools, we rarely question the basic premise - the adolescents need to be educated about sex. How did we come to expect the public schools to mange our children's sexuality? more important, what is it about the adolescent that arouses so much anxiety among adults?

There's a sexual revolution coming to a schoolroom near you, but it's not the one you remember. When Sex Goes to School explores the ideas and values behind the fight over sex education through the lives of parents, its most passionate participants. Distinguished sociologist Kristin Luker spent over twenty years talking to people in ordinary communities about sex and how, if at all, it should be taught. Luker argues that Americans are now deeply divided over sex, largely as a legacy of the 1960s. She traces sex education from its birth in 1913 to its more politicized modern incarnation, examining in detail the marriage-minded 1950s and the sexual and gender revolutions of the 1960s. She explores how our parents' sexual attitudes have influenced us and, in turn, how our sexual choices affect the way we teach our children about sex. Her conclusions are unexpected, and after reading this book it is impossible to look at the intersection of the intimate and the political in the same way.

Hailed by The New York Times as a "feminist classic," this comprehensive guide to all aspects of women's sexuality and reproductive health--including menopause, birth control, childbirth, sexual health, sexual orientation, gender identity, mental health, and overall wellbeing--changed the women's health movement around the world and remains as important and relevant as ever. Providing detailed and empowering information on women's reproductive health and sexuality, this latest edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves shows how to find and access health information and offers additional resources and stories to educate women about health care injustices and inspires them to work collectively to address them.