About the Event:

This special Author Series talk will consider the influence of Calderone’s life history on her work and core ideas. It will then examine the connection between Calderone and deliberate efforts from the late 1960s to bring sex education into US medical school curricula, an attempt to show doctors-in-training how to talk to their patients about intimate matters.

About the Author:

Ellen S. More, Ph.D., Professor emeritus at UMass Chan Medical School, is a historian of the American medical profession. In addition to The Transformation of American Sex Education: Mary Calderone and the Fight for Sexual Health (NYU), she is the author or editor of four other books, including Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850–1995 (Harvard), recipient of the Margaret Rossiter Prize from the History of Science Society, and Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine (Johns Hopkins), which was awarded the Best Publication award from the ALHHS. She was guest curator for the National Library of Medicine’s exhibition on the history of women physicians in the US, Changing the Face of Medicine, as well as a Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advance Studies.

About the Book:

At a time when abortion access in the United States has been severely curtailed, the health implications of receiving medically accurate, inclusive sex education cannot be overstated. Ellen More’s The Transformation of American Sex Education: Mary Calderone and the Fight for Sexual Health for the first time situates Dr. Mary Calderone at the center of decades of political, cultural, and religious conflict in the fight for comprehensive and medically accurate sex education. Part biography, part social history, it traces the history of contemporary American sex education from the work of a group of reformers who coalesced around Calderone to create the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in 1964 to the development of the competing approaches to sex education that have vied for public acceptance since the 1980s.