Condom Nation
The U.S. Government's Sex Education Campaign from World War I to the Internet
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Publisher Description
An award-winning history of the U.S. Public Health Service's haphazard efforts to educate Americans about sex for more than a century.
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.
With engaging and insightful analysis, Lord explains how tensions among these organizations exacerbated existing controversies about sexual behavior. She also discusses why the Public Health Service's promotional tactics sometimes fueled public fears about the federal government's goals in promoting, or not promoting, sex education.
Award for the Public Understanding of Science, 2010, British Medical Association's Board of Science
First Prize, Popular Medicine, British Medical Association 2010 Book Awards
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lord, a public health historian, argues that the U.S. government has spent the past 90 years trying to give Americans frank sex education, but the power of religious groups and Americans' own squeamishness in admitting to having premarital sex has thwarted public health officials for nearly all of that time. After an informative, pithy explanation of the origins of the modern Health and Human Services Department and the surgeon general post, Lord documents the government's sex education efforts, successes and failures decade by decade, in chronological, rather than thematic order. By slogging through a chronological account of sex education, she skips over the opportunity to consider why Americans have had such trouble talking not just about sex education, but about sex itself, and how that unease is at the core of this country's ambivalence over "aggressive and candid programs promoting sex education" for teenagers. The book functions, at best, as a desk reference, a year by year catalogue of government policy, rather than a substantive discussion of the modern history of American sex education.
