From Home to School: Menstrual Education Films of the 1950s

Saniya Lee Ghanoui

doi:10.1007/978-981-15-0614-7_67

From Home to School: Menstrual Education Films of the 1950s

Review

In: The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies [Internet]. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan; 2020. Chapter 67.

2020 Jul 25.

Author

Saniya Lee Ghanoui¹

Book Editors

Chris Bobel¹, Inga T. Winkler², Breanne Fahs³, Katie Ann Hasson⁴, Elizabeth Arveda Kissling⁵, Tomi-Ann Roberts⁶

Affiliation

¹ Urbana, IL, USA

Book Affiliations

¹ Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA
² Garden City Park, NY, USA
³ Women and Gender Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis, Arizona State University, Glendale, AZ, USA
⁴ Center for Genetics and Society, Berkeley, CA, USA
⁵ Women’s & Gender Studies, Eastern Washington University, Cheney, WA, USA
⁶ Department of Psychology, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO, USA

Excerpt

In this essay, Ghanoui examines two menstrual education films of the 1950s widely used in the United States: Molly Grows Up (1953) and As Boys Grow (1957). Ghanoui discusses how the films portrayed the menstrual cycle and how educational literature received the films. She argues that the films became popular because they eased the teaching responsibilities of school instructors without taking away their authority—the films supplemented traditional menstrual education in schools while teachers maintained jurisdiction in their classrooms.

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