I was raised by my mother in a state of almost Victorian ignorance about my body. Even at a women’s college like Barnard, which I attended as a day student, practical information about sexual matters was sketchy. In Modern Living, a required course I took as a freshman in 1951, we were taught the names and functions of the male and female sexual organs, as if the body were a machine without sentience, under the full control of its owner. In one lecture, there were allusions to Family Planning, which sounded sensible to me, like budgeting, but I certainly wasn’t planning a family at sixteen.
Source : My Abortion War Story
