The Mansion of Happiness (17 page)

Early-twentieth-century Progressives, who could make a science of licking envelopes if they set their minds to it—which is why so many ideas about life and death hinge on this period—made a science of adolescence. Sex education in the public schools began in the 1910s; by 1922, the subject was taught in nearly half of all public schools in the United States.
⁵⁸
The first sex books for kids were schoolbooks. About matters anatomical, they were candid. About the dangers of venereal disease, they were concerned. But as for that question Rousseau mentioned—“Where do little children come from?”—they were, as yet, coy.

“All live things start from eggs,” wrote
Winfield Scott Hall in 1912 in
Life’s Beginnings: For Boys of Ten to Fourteen Years.
Hall, a professor of physiology at Northwestern University, and no relation to G. Stanley Hall, was, at the time, America’s foremost sexologist.
⁵⁹
The author of such classics as
From Youth into Manhood
, he wrote with a winning frankness (“Turning our attention now to the testicles …”) and had been particularly commended for his forgiving attitude toward the nocturnal emission (“It is a perfectly natural experience that results in no loss of vitality, only a slight depletion of material”).
⁶⁰
His books about what he called “the great truths of life” included a twenty-five-cent pamphlet titled
Instead of “Wild Oats”
and a collaboration with his wife,
Jeannette Winter Hall,
Girlhood and Its Problems: The Sex Life of Woman
, although he was perhaps best known for a 320-page manual,
Sexual Knowledge: In Plain and Simple Language
, published by the International Bible House in 1913 and available, for two dollars, bound in morocco.
⁶¹

In
Life’s Beginnings
, a twenty-five-cent primer published by the YMCA, Winfield Scott Hall aimed to explain the birds and the bees by way of the barnyard, as if every boy were
William Harvey: “All boys are interested in live things, therefore all boys are interested in eggs. The best place to see all kinds of eggs is out on a farm.”
⁶²
Let’s go out to the country, he told his readers, city boys all. In the henhouse, a “motherly old biddy” sits on a nest of eggs. Where do those eggs come from? Let’s follow the farmer’s wife into the kitchen, where she’s butchering
chickens for Sunday dinner. “When the farmer’s wife opens the bodies of these hens to remove their internal organs, she finds in each an ovary or egg-sack, with many eggs in different stages of development,” Hall explains. “If the egg is to develop into a chicken it must be fertilized. Every day the rooster deposits the fertilizing fluid in the pouch or
cloaca
of the hen.”
⁶³
Next he takes his readers down
to the pond, to watch the frogs spawn. By
chapter 3
, he’s moved on to kittens and puppies, colts and calves. Do these animals come from eggs, too? “Yes, all these animals begin as tiny little eggs. But they are so delicate that, if they were deposited in any nest outside of the body, they would surely be destroyed, so nature has provided that in all these animals the delicate eggs should be held within a sort of nest in the mother’s body. This nest is called the
womb.
” And then, somewhat abruptly, our tour comes to a close:

That, it hardly needs to be said, leaves rather a lot to the imagination.

E. B. White was thirteen years old when Winfield Scott Hall published
Life’s Beginnings: For Boys of Ten to Fourteen Years.
In 1929, the year he married Katharine Angell, White, with his officemate,
James Thurber, published his first book,
Is Sex Necessary?
(Their answer: not strictly, no, but it beats raising begonias.)
Is Sex Necessary?
is a lampoon of the sex books that White had grown up with. It features fake Freudian sexologists (viz., the undersized Dr. Samuel D. Schmalhausen) and a chapter, written by White, addressing the child’s perennial question: “What shall I tell my parents about sex?” The answer: “Tell them the truth. If the subject is approached in a tactful way, it should be no more embarrassing to teach a parent about sex than to teach him about personal pronouns. And it should be less discouraging.”
⁶⁵

White’s first children’s book,
Stuart Little
, could easily have been titled
Is Childbirth Necessary?
(Not strictly, no, but it beats banning books.) Plenty of grown-ups got the joke about how the tale of the mouse was, among
other things, a sly commentary on Progressive-era sex education. The
Washington Post
even ran a review that took the form of a loving imitation of
Is Sex Necessary?
right down to the idiotic Freudian sexologists, in this case, Dr. Hans Von Hornswoggle, who asserts that
Stuart Little
must be a hoax: “ ‘Lacks verisimilitude from the very first line,’ said Herr Von Hornswoggle. ‘Man or mouse, homo sapiens or
Mus musculus
—no little rodent can sail a ship in Central Park lagoon while still teething. Much, much too Jung.’ ”
⁶⁶
Kids, though, were too young to get that one.

“Have you ever thought about an egg, perhaps the one you know best, the
chicken egg?” Books like
Window into an Egg: Seeing Life Begin
, which explained the story of life through pictures of a chicken egg with a piece of the shell missing, were still being published in 1969.
⁶⁷
But that same year also saw the publication of
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)
, which rather dramatically raised the stakes (and inspired a
Woody Allen film). Sex left the farm.

The possibility that books explaining sex to kids could become far more explicit came into play after 1957, when, in
Roth v. United States
, the Supreme Court drew a distinction between sexual explicitness and obscenity, which meant that, if being explicit had a redeeming social value, you could be explicit.
⁶⁸
By the 1960s, sex education had become a partisan battleground, especially after the founding of both the
Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States and a flock of local organizations, like the
New York League for Sexual Freedom. Their reforms of the sex education curriculum
in public schools—which consisted not only of greater explicitness but also of a rejection of the Progressives’ chastity-and-
marriage curriculum, the promotion of contraception, and the discussion of
homosexuality—led to campaigns to regulate it by organizations including the
John Birch Society, whose founder called sex education a “filthy communist plot.”

Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?
was the title of a pamphlet published by the Christian Crusade in 1968.
⁶⁹
In the 1970s, the
battle over sex education got nastier, especially in the wake of
Roe v. Wade.
⁷⁰
Kids trying to figure out sex were caught in the middle. Then came
AIDS. During all this time, a great deal remained as unspeakable as it had been in the days of
Sylvester Graham’s brimstone. In 1994, U.S. surgeon general
Joycelyn Elders was asked, at an AIDS forum, whether it might not be a good idea to discuss masturbation with children. “I think that it is something that’s part of human sexuality and it’s part of something that perhaps should be taught,” Elders said. “But we’ve not even taught our children the very basics. And I feel that we have tried ignorance for a very long time and it’s time we try education.” Within hours, Elders was asked to resign.
⁷¹

Teaching sex became a political minefield. And facts-of-life books changed. They no longer involved going to a farm or studying other animals; this is not zoology class. We are not dissecting frogs; we are thinking about ourselves. Late twentieth-century books were full of anatomical drawings of the insides of kids’ bodies, with cross sections of gonads on every page. That’s partly because, outside a laboratory or a surgery, some of those things had only recently been photographed,
Lennart Nilsson–style. But it’s also because of the culture’s inward looking.
Eggs and
sperm aren’t to be found out there in the barnyard or on some farmer’s wife’s kitchen table: they are inside of
you.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, nothing was left to the imagination anymore: “1 sperm + 1 egg = 1 baby,”
Robie Harris explained, in
It’s NOT the Stork! A Book About Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families, and Friends
(2006). “When grownups want to make a baby,” she went on, “most often a woman and a man have a special kind of loving called ‘making love’—‘having sex’—or ‘sex.’ This kind of loving happens when the woman and the man get so close to each other that the man’s penis goes inside the woman’s vagina.”
⁷²
Life’s Beginnings
was for boys ten to fourteen;
It’s NOT the Stork
was for kids as young as four.

Over the course of a century, where babies come from had become baby stuff. Books for kids older than about seven or eight covered that subject, but they were far more concerned with the perils of puberty. Adolescence seemed to be starting earlier and earlier and, somehow, to be getting harder and harder. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, every generation of Americans has found adolescence to be stormier than it had been, ever before. Meanwhile, the beginning of life, a mystery that evolved into a science, became yet another form of therapy, as if every kid needed Von Hornswoggle. The disorder it treated was growing up.

“It is much,
much
harder to be a teenage girl now than ever before,” insisted the gynecologist
Jennifer Ashton in 2009, in
The Body Scoop for Girls: A Straight-Talk Guide to a Healthy, Beautiful You.
⁷³
“Am I weird?”
you wonder. “
No!
”
Lynda Madaras insisted, in
Ready, Set, Grow!
“You are not weird. You are 100% NORMAL! You’re just starting puberty.” Madaras’s book included a chapter called “B.O. and Zits.”
⁷⁴
You’re 100 percent normal, but you stink, and if you would only be more careful about your grooming, you could look so much better. “If puberty is something that just happens, why do you need to read about it?”
Louise Spilsbury asked in
Me, Myself and I: All About Sex and Puberty
, in 2009. Her answer: “Finding out more about puberty will also help you deal with the practical side of it, from shaving to sanitary pads.”
⁷⁵
And, to be sure, there was in that era’s crop of well-intentioned books an abundance of practical information.
The Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls
, published in 1998 by the makers of the American Girl dolls, had this to say about underarm hair: “Whether you want to remove it or leave it there is a very personal decision.”
⁷⁶
No subject was too small. How to shave your legs, how to shave your face (“take special care when shaving around pimples”), how to insert a tampon, how to ask someone on a date, what to say on a date, what not to say (“Never Tell Your Boyfriend You’re on the Pill,” advised Ashton), how to spy on your vagina with a hand mirror, how to brush your hair (“use a wide-tooth comb to detangle small sections”), even how to brush your teeth. If you find that your clothes are suddenly too small for you, one author patiently explained, that’s because you’re
growing
, dear.
⁷⁷

For adults, there were, at the turn of the twenty-first century, a new generation of books offering guidance on how to talk to kids about sex, including
Ten Talks Parents Must Have with Their Children About Sex and Character
, in which
Pepper Schwartz and
Dominic Cappello provided scripts, line-by-line instruction. “I’m reading this chapter about sex and character,” you were supposed to begin, holding the book in your hands. “I need to talk to you for five or ten minutes.”
⁷⁸
Ten minutes? How much more can a kid take?

It was in the kitchen. I was reading the newspaper. A small, bookish boy sat by my side.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Do you need a conundrum for oral sex?”

I put down my newspaper. I sighed. And then, carrying on an ancient and honorable family tradition, I whiffed the bejeezus out of that one.

D
ick Weymer, a forty-one-year-old engineer, was about to begin an affair. He was bored with his wife, Andrea. The Weymers had four children and had been married for twenty years. “He told me I was dull and stupid, uninteresting, that I did not inspire him,” Andrea said. “Living with her,” Dick said, “is like being aboard that ship that cruised forever between the ports of Tedium and Monotony.” Can this marriage be saved? You bet. In 1953, the Weymers went to the
American Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles, the country’s first, largest, and most successful marriage clinic, called, by reporters, “the Mayo Clinic of family problems.” Urged by the clinic’s staff to make herself more interesting, Andrea learned how to make better conversation, went on a diet, and lost eight pounds. The affair was averted, the marriage saved.
¹

The American Institute of Family Relations was founded by
Paul Popenoe, the father of
marriage counseling. Popenoe is best remembered for a column published in
Ladies’ Home Journal:
“Can This Marriage Be Saved?”
²
For a quarter century, the stories in the magazine came from his clinic. He counseled more than a thousand couples a year.
³
At its height, Popenoe’s
empire included not only “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” but also stacks of marriage manuals; a syndicated newspaper column, “Modern Marriage”; a radio program,
Love and Marriage;
and a stint as a judge on a television show called
Divorce Hearing.
People called him “Mr. Marriage.” They also called him “Dr. Popenoe,” even though his only academic degree was an honorary one.
⁴