My mother died in 2007 and my father in 2010. I had plenty of time to ask them questions. I did ask some, and got some answers. Perhaps some of the questions I consider now are ones they didn't even know the answers to themselves.
My father was born in 1920 and raised in a rather devout Northern Baptist family. They were not well off, and he attended Bates College on scholarship. He reports that at some point in college he realized God didn't exist; it just didn't make sense. He went into biology, following in his big brother's footsteps, and was working towards a PhD at Harvard in roughly 1942. My mother's story is that he avoided the draft because of either a physical deferment (flat feet?) or being in an essential occupation (teaching anatomy and physiology to medical students). Sometimes one, sometimes the other. There was a sense that he was too sensitive to have been suitable for the army, but I'm not sure I ever heard that idea really supported. It is a bit hard to picture him in basic training but I imagine this was true of a lot of draftees. I don't recall anyone saying he volunteered and was disappointed he couldn't serve his country in that way. I asked if he had made any sacrifices on account of the war, and he said he did teach some extra sections way beyond what would have been the usual load, I guess. I think his thesis work was on hormonal cycles of the frog. Getting jobs and getting tenure in the late 1940s was very easy due to the extreme shortage of professors to teach the many students who enrolled under the GI Bill.
At some point around 1961, as a tenured professor at University of New Hampshire, he noticed that the college students were woefully uninformed about the basic facts of human sexuality, and he started teaching the course Human Reproductive Biology. He was qualified to do this from a scientific perspective because of his work in endocrinology. This course became very popular, especially when it met a science distribution requirement. But it was also a subject that the students cared about a lot on a practical level. At one point three lecture halls were required to accommodate all his students -- he lectured live in one and the other two saw closed-circuit TV images of him. At its peak he enrolled 2,000 students a semester. New Hampshire was then a very conservative state, and there was a lot of backlash against teaching sex to college students -- that was up to parents! Yet this man who shied away from conflict in most aspects of life did not shy away here. He kept teaching the course despite the fierce criticism.
Later in his career some woman (foreign student, I think) was arrested for walking through Durham naked, to make some political point. Against the advice of his attorney, he testified for the defense, saying that especially as she had never bent over, she had not displayed any sex organs, so the law did not apply. Why did he volunteer? A sense that the local climate was too prudish about sexual matters?
A stor of a different kind:. Natural childbirth was not a common idea in the early 1960s, and some students showed him a film on the subject, hoping he would show it to his class. He declined, noting that the women in question were obviously in a lot of pain, and he was afraid that women who had that to look forward to would never want to become mothers.
But returning to the big picture, what inspired a retiring, conflict-avoidant professor who was deemed too sensitive for the army to start a course on sex education and keep at it in the face of intense criticism?
My mother was born in 1921 into a family that was prosperous due to ownership of a prestigious wholesale drug company (BO and GC Wilson). But when the depression hit it wiped out the company, so she too attended Bates College on scholarship. Her parents were Republicans. My grandfather in his diary underlined election day of 1932 with "Voted for HOOVER!" My grandmother was later very much on the Joe McCarthy bandwagon, genuinely concerned about the alleged armies of communists that had infiltrated the land. In the era of the Vietnam War, my mother was doing anything she could to help me and my two brothers avoid the draft, but my grandmother thought it was a cowardly dereliction of duty to country. From this conservative background my mother joined up in the human potential movement of the 1960s, including such things as Encounter Groups. What made her adopt values so different from her parents? For her it was less of a change, perhaps, as there was a movement arising that she could become part of.. Becoming atheist was a smaller step, because while her parents were heavily involved in the FUSN church as workers in the organization, neither was particularly devout.
My mother was a valued counselor to high school students (more or less a therapist), and a few of them became friends in her personal life. This would be strongly discouraged today but was not considered a problem back then. One "Curt" visited at our house frequently on weekends. They developed such a rapport that they traveled around New England together showing a human potential slideshow they had devised, "Child of Clay". He also traveled with our family to Europe a couple times. My father had no use for human potential issues, and Curt was a companion to help my mother accommodate those interests.
I did not know at that time that he was gay -- I only figured that out in college. Suddenly (roughly 1974) it all made sense -- they could have this close relationship emotionally, but there would be no sexual tension to tempt her to be untrue to my father. Except then it suddenly didn't make sense, because I discovered (around 2009, I think) she was in fact having sex with Curt at that time. It was a common view at that time that homosexuality could be cured by heterosexual experience, and she wanted to help cure her friend. My father was fully aware of this. However, surely most women did not choose to have sex with gay men unless they themselves felt considerable desire in that direction. It all stopped when Curt decided to embrace his gay identity and started having sex with men.
It was an interesting situation regarding the secrecy involved. It was not an illicit affair in that my father knew (though I do not think he was at all happy about it). But we boys were not informed, which was a sensible choice because of the extreme stigma Curt would have faced had it been known he was gay. To her credit, my mother was largely consistent and adopted a liberal attitude towards sexuality with us boys. Sex was OK as long as both partners were willing and there was the use of reliable contraception. She also adopted the view that statutory rape shouldn't be a crime when girls were willing participants, and definitely felt it was at an entirely different level of offense from "ordinary" rape.
She had definitely non-liberal views on some key questions. She agreed with many thinkers of the time that overpopulation was a catastrophic problem, but laid the blame squarely at the feet of ill-disiplined poor people who did not limit their family sizes, and I think also feared that the higher reproduction rate of these same poor people would weaken the gene pool. Shadows of eugenics.
My mother was widely agreed to be self-centered, and her parents and husband cooperated in having her emotional needs and moods be at the center of life of the extended family. But one incident stuck with me. She was trying to earn her PhD at Boston University in psychology. She wanted to study homosexuality in men. Confidants at the department told her privately that she shouldn't do that, because the senior faculty just couldn't deal with that topic. She felt it was her right to do her thesis on the topic she chose anyway, and the lesson imparted to me was how terribly unfair it was of the BU department to put obstacles in her way (she never got the PhD). I accepted her version of events. In more recent years I parse it differently -- often you have to compromise to get what you want in life. She was unwilling to compromise, and just felt wronged when she was stopped. My father also later confided that he thought she rather panicked at the prospect of doing a PhD thesis, so perhaps that muddies the lesson somewhat.
Conservative grandparents, and quite liberal parents at a time (on issues of sexuality, largely?) when they were rare... What caused the shift?
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