Human Growth 3rd Ed. (1976)

Director	John A. Bruce
Producer	E.C. Brown Foundation, Wexler Films
Contributors
Length	20 min
B&W/Color	Color
UO Library Catalog description:	Presents adolescent sexual development as part of an overall physical, emotional, and social process. Biological facts of puberty and reproduction in attractive animation are alternated with live comments, questions, and interviews with fifth and sixth graders, junior and senior high students, and young married couples concerning their own feelings and decisions. A brief live birth scene is also included
Call #	Mb281
Genre	Instructional
Rare	YES
Online	NO
Copyright status	Copyrighted
Physical condition	Good
Oregon-related	YES

Notes:

The E.C. Brown Foundation gave a private financial boost for family life and sex education in Oregon starting in the 1930’s.  The three-fold purpose of the then trust and now foundation were 1) the social hygiene on behalf of the youth of Oregon, 2) a reverence for the married state, and 3) the prevention of sexual abuse especially venereal disease.

We own the first and second edition of Human Growth as well at the University of Oregon archives and online.

I earlier this year used a text by the director of this film, John Allen Bruce, in my blog for A Family Talks About Sex.  When I found that he also directed this film and was heavily involved with the E.C. Brown Foundation I decided to look into him.  I didn’t find much except that he directed films for and worked with the E.C. Brown Foundation until I came across a paper he published in The Journal of Marriage and Family in August of 1976.  In his study, “Intergenerational Solidarity versus Progress for Women?”, he interviewed mother-daughter pairs (all white, middle-class) concerning whether the mother was employed or not and then the role that mother played in progressing the next generation (i.e. launching their daughter into marriage).

“Resource theory thus directs us to look for a greater marital progress correlation, as we have called it, among mothers who do not work. … While in each category the cor-relation departs from zero at a significant level, so that by our logic we may say that launching remains a mutually important task for all of these respondents, the launching task endeavors are apparently more closely matched when mothers possess less of each resource. It is possible that working mothers may have a different idea of social placement for their daughters. … If parental involvement in mate choice is indeed positively related to later intergener-ational solidarity, is it reasonable to infer from the tentative evidence presented here that the direction of social change presently celebrated for women may have the unin-tended consequence of contributing to a further lessening of closeness between gener-ations? … At our present level of knowledge, how-ever, mothers and daughters may be said to be the most prominent actors in the construc-tion of the next generation, and the evidence presented here suggests that working mothers appear to be less mutually involved with their daughters in this task than their nonworking counterparts. If the research reported here should, in consequence, possibly be predic-tive of greater intergenerational isolation to come, it does not follow that the solution is therefore the responsibility of women alone.”

Source: Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Aug., 1976), pp. 519-524

Published by: National Council on Family RelationsStable

URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/350420

Accessed: 05/06/2012 16:32