Vintage 1953 Sex Ed for Girls: "Molly Grows Up"

Menstruation education film for young teenage girls, redolent with dated detail. Millions of you will probably remember watching this film at a particular moment of your lives. The rest of you probably remember either watching The Story of Menstruation (the other ubiquitous menstruation film) or being sent outside to play dodge ball while the girls had their "special assembly." These films absolved millions of mothers from actually having to talk to their daughters about "the curse." So its kind of ironic that the mother in this film is so open to the subject that when Molly tells her she just had her first period, the mother immediately sets Molly down and asks her to tell her all about it. Even Molly's dad can hear the subject mentioned without embarrassment, only a little wistfulness that his daughter is growing up so quickly. In general, the family in this film is one of those perfect cinematic families that nevertheless seem so "normal" that we become convinced that ours is the only family that's "weird." In addition, this film features a cool-as-a-cucumber school nurse, the word "menstruation" pronounced "men-stru-a-shun" by everybody, the usual diagram of the uterus and Fallopian tubes, and the usual explanation of how babies are made that carefully avoids telling us how the "male cells" got into the uterus. Everybody needs at least one menstruation film in their educational film collection--this one is a classic of the genre. Producer: Medical Arts Productions