Elaine Catherine Pierson-Mastroianni, 89, author of sex guide

THE SO-CALLED "sexual revolution" was in full cry in the mid-1960s when Elaine Pierson-Mastroianni was running the student health clinic at the University of Pennsylvania and noticed an interesting phenomenon.

Young female students would show up at the clinic in October and February, a few months after their last dates with boyfriends back home during summer and the holiday breaks.

Why then?

Well, it didn't take Elaine long to come to the obvious conclusion. She had been writing frank articles about sex and contraception for the University of Pennsylvania's undergraduate newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, and she was well aware of where these young women were coming from.

Her articles had caught the attention of Bart Lippincott, president of Philadelphia's Lippincott Publishing House. He wanted a book.

The result of Elaine's observations and her concerns about the possibility of unwanted student pregnancies was Sex is Never an Emergency: A Candid Guide for College Students (1971).

Elaine Catherine Pierson-Mastroianni, an obstetrician and gynecologist, who also co-wrote Female and Male: Dimensions on Human Sexuality, published in 1974, died Saturday of lung cancer. She was 89 and lived in Bryn Mawr.

Elaine was the wife of Dr. Luigi Mastroianni Jr., head of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania, who died in November 2008 at the age of 83.

Elaine wanted Sex is Never an Emergency to reach as many students as possible. She designed the cover of the first of its three editions and insisted it cost only $1. It was handed out to every incoming student at Penn. More than 200,000 copies were sold.

"My primary objective of this little book is to prevent unwanted pregnancies and, secondarily, to help students be more comfortable with their level of sexuality, whatever that level is," she once said.

But she felt she had to put her concerns in a moral context.

"Just because I am trying to help solve a problem, which clearly exists, in an honest, straightforward way, need not imply that I necessarily approve of the gestalt of the '60s and '70s that created the problem," she said.

Elaine was appalled at someone else's redesign of the third edition of her book when it showed up with a pink cover.

"No male would ever carry a pink book," she said.

Her second book, written with sociologist Bill D'Antonio, created something of a sensation due to its line drawings of an erect penis.

Elaine Pierson was born in East Tawas, Mich., to Edd Pierson, a plumber, and Dorothy Pierson, a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse.

When her mother and other women in the community started a public library, Elaine, then 10, was asked to review the books being offered.

She thought Sigmund Freud's On Humor was OK, but she gave Gone With the Wind a mixed review. That may have been because her mother wouldn't let her read the last half. She never knew why, but when the movie came out in 1939, she couldn't bring herself to watch the second half.

Among her childhood memories was sitting on the lap of Detroit Tigers second baseman Charlie Gehringer, a future Hall of Famer.

The Depression was raging, but Elaine managed to scrape together admittance to the Fox Theater in Detroit to see the big bands of Tommy Dorsey, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, among others.

She graduated from East Tawas High School in 1943 and received a full scholarship to the University of Michigan. She earned a bachelor's degree in zoology and was one of 90 women admitted to medical school. She dropped out after her first year and returned to a doctorate program after experiencing the difficulty of competing with the men who collaborated outside of class.

Elaine built a reputation as an anatomist and embryologist. Money was scarce and she waited tables at the biological station in northern Michigan. A co-worker was James Watson, who would win the Nobel Prize with Francis Crick for discovering the DNA double helix.

Elaine returned to medical school and received her degree in 1956. She interned at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve.

Still short on money, she took a job delivering automobiles for a local car dealership. In 1957, she delivered a yellow convertible to Hartford, Conn., where she finagled an interview at Yale and was hired as a resident in obstetrics and gynecology.

It was there that she met Luigi Mastroianni, a young assistant professor in obstetrics and gynecology. They were married on Nov. 4, 1957, in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Luigi's colleague, the late John Rock, developer of the first birth-control pill, was best man.

"The night before their wedding, they watched Sputnik circle overhead, and thought about the future," her family said.

In the mid-1960s, the family, which had expanded by three children, moved to Philadelphia, where Dr. Mastroianni became head of the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and Elaine took over the student health center and wrote those articles for the Daily Pennsylvanian.

For the first time, there was a female co-editor of the newspaper, Judith L. Teller, and she permitted the frank, pull-no-punches articles about sex to be printed - however, under a vaguely male pseudonym.

Elaine is survived by two sons, John and Robert; a daughter, Anna; her brother, James Edward Pierson; and seven grandchildren.

Services: A memorial service will be held this summer in Woods Hole, Mass. She will be buried there, at the Church of the Messiah, with her husband.