Abstinence as something that was taught to you while you were in high school is fascinating to me as a man who had gone to a New Jersey school (a public and also a private school) in the 1980s, as I would not have believed that abstinence would have been taught to women in the USA in any school system, public or private. I was entirely oblivious to how girls were taught in different schools in different parts of the USA or the world other than my own until I became an adult. We accept as normal what we grow up with.
I appreciate that you mentioned Sojourner Truth. I look forward to learning about Sojourner Truth. I’d gone to K-12 school just PRIOR to intersectionality (in this case between women’s rights and black’s rights) making necessary inroads to US schools, although I did learn a little in my first time at college – all very eye opening for me.
So at the time, assuming my experience translated to other parts of the USA, a high schooler might learn about women’s rights and then about the rights of African-Americans but a figure like Sojourner Truth likely did not fit cleanly into an either/or situation and on top of it being religious, even more of an uncomfortable history for the more limited school US History books I’d been exposed to.