Why did they need to separate the girls to teach them about punctuation?
Not answering the OP but IIRC when Kinsey (of Kinsey Report fame) started teaching sex ed at university in the 1950s he was only allowed to teach it to married students.
You think that was bad? This is what the boys got.
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Really depends on what comprehensive means - I’m sure I had some sort of sex education unit in high school. I might have had something in my Catholic grade school but if I did, it wasn’t comprehensive enough to keep me from being shocked when I entered a public high school in 9th grade and encountered pregnant classmates. What I know for certain is that nobody ever mentioned that it could be enjoyable. I’ve known/heard of men who know virtually nothing about the reproductive part - they may know about slot A and tab B but they are surprised to hear that women who had a c-section still bleed and for roughly the same amount of time as after a vaginal birth. Some believe menstruating women can “hold in in” until they get to a restroom and let it all out then. Then there’s that Congressman who thought the body would “shut down” preventing a raped women from becoming pregnant - he couldn’t possibly have been the only one who believed that.
I entered college in 1973 and one of my classmates had never been taught about menstruation, not by her mother and not by the school. She had it explained only after her first period when she thought she was dying.
Our school taught the girls about menstruation in 6th grade. And taught some more about procreation in 8th grade (cue: line drawings of the cross-section of a penis without much context). But that wasn’t enough. I didn’t figure out what body part went where until midway through high school.
Just my anecdotes.
I relieved some fairly clinical, plumbing type education in early '70s school which I recall as being valueless in navigating my early sexuality. IIRC, menstruation was covered, so there may have been some value to the girls.
When I was a camp nurse about 10 years ago we had a girl who had a period at camp and was not prepared. She was just stuffing soiled underwear into the bottom of her locker until it was found out. We had female nurses, so I was only peripherally involved in these events.
My mom, for some reason, shared with me that she was surprised and terrified by her first period and her older sister had shamed her about being freaked out.
Speaking of the other thread, she claimed that my father had to explain sex to her on their wedding night. Later I found out that her early adulthood was less chaste than she liked to present, but I have no pressing reason to doubt the menstruation anecdote.
The Congressman (Todd Akin of Missouri) was repeating the theory of John C. Wilke, M.D., a leading proponent for abstinence-based birth control and against abortion. Wilke’s claim received wide publicity among the pro-life movement, but is unsupported by scientific evidence.
That’s pretty much what we got in 8th grade “health” class, which was part of PE and therefore separate classes for boys and girls. (Chicago area, '67-'68 school year.) Also included was info on the physical changes that come with puberty.