...This chapter follows Mary Calderone’s early writings on sexuality education, which emphasize the child’s right to sexual (self-)pleasure, her work at Planned Parenthood, her first book (Release from Sexual Tensions,1960), and Planned Parenthood’s unwillingness to take...

...This chapter describes the role of Mary Calderone, SIECUS, and teachers of sex education such as Peggy Brick, Michael Carrera, and others, in putting “sex” into sex-education curricula, what they taught, how they taught it, and the evolution from “family life education” to programs such as those...

...This chapter, after briefly following SIECUS’s faltering fortunes during the 1980s, follows the last decade of Mary Calderone’s career after her departure from SIECUS in 1982. Increasingly she returned to the early themes of her work—the value and validity of childhood sexuality and the role...

...Chapter 1 tells the story of Mary Calderone’s childhood as the daughter of photographer Edward Steichen, her childhood sexual traumas, her difficult path to medical school and public health, and the way she reframed the story of her childhood experiences to motivate and explain her lifelong...