Sex Radicals in America's Heartland - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Sex Radicals in America's Heartland write by Andrea M. Weingartner. This book was released on 2013. Sex Radicals in America's Heartland available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This study examines the rise of sex radicalism in Kansas and the larger Midwest as men and women sought to redefine the ways in which they thought about gender and sexuality. Specifically, it follows the career of Moses Harman, his journal Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, and the conversation of its many correspondents. Sex radicals based their ideas of free love on the tradition of American freethought and were rooted in the class struggle that marked the economic inequalities of the gilded age. While previous studies of free love consider the way in which the movement empowered women, a complete gendered analysis is lacking in the historiography. Examining the movement's male leaders, I argue that free love served to empower men at a time when they were experiencing a crisis in their own male identities. Through the promotion of women's emancipation from "sex slavery" and the abolishment of marriage, sex radical men sought to throw off church and state oppression, defend against gilded-age capitalism, and recreate a form of individualism that they believed had been lost since the early nineteenth century. In making these arguments, I address several key aspects of the movement that have not received adequate attention, including manhood and masculinity, class dynamics, freethought, eugenics, and the region of the Midwestern United States. Only a thorough investigation of all these factors together can bring a complete gendered analysis of the free love movement and the men and women who were involved in it.
Sex in the Heartland
Sex in the Heartland - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Sex in the Heartland write by Beth L. BAILEY. This book was released on 2009-06-30. Sex in the Heartland available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Sex in the Heartland is the story of the sexual revolution in a small university town in the quintessential heartland state of Kansas. Bypassing the oft-told tales of radicals and revolutionaries on either coast, Beth Bailey argues that the revolution was forged in towns and cities alike, as "ordinary" people struggled over the boundaries of public and private sexual behavior in postwar America. Bailey fundamentally challenges contemporary perceptions of the revolution as simply a triumph of free love and gay lib. Rather, she explores the long-term and mainstream changes in American society, beginning in the economic and social dislocations of World War II and the explosion of mass media and communication, which aided and abetted the sexual upheaval of the 1960s. Focusing on Lawrence, Kansas, we discover the intricacies and depth of a transformation that was nurtured at the grass roots. Americans used the concept of revolution to make sense of social and sexual changes as they lived through them. Everything from the birth control pill and counterculture to Civil Rights, was conflated into "the revolution," an accessible but deceptive simplification, too easy to both glorify and vilify. Bailey untangles the radically different origins, intentions, and outcomes of these events to help us understand their roles and meanings for sex in contemporary America. She argues that the sexual revolution challenged and partially overturned a system of sexual controls based on oppression, inequality, and exploitation, and created new models of sex and gender relations that have shaped our society in powerful and positive ways. Table of Contents: Introduction Before the Revolution Sex and the Therapeutic Culture Responsible Sex Prescribing the Pill Revolutionary Intent Sex as a Weapon Sex and Liberation Remaking Sex Epilogue Abbreviations Notes Acknowledgments Index Reviews of this book: [A] vivid reminder of just how national and chaotic the events we call 'the sixties' really were...Bailey's exploration of the sexual revolution offers a subtler sense of the underlying forces of that era, which unified even while dividing a nation and, ultimately, the world. --Tom Engelhardt, The Nation Reviews of this book: [Beth Bailey's] applied research here is interesting, imaginative and compassionate, and the final treat is that Bailey is a very good writer. Sex in the Heartland is simply a fascinating read. I'm sorry I can't call her up and congratulate her on this book in person...[This book is] beautifully shaped, carefully thought out, a treasury of useful information. --Carolyn See, Washington Post Reviews of this book: One of the great strengths of this book is Bailey's ability to make local characters, institutions and fights vital and compelling, all the while keeping an eye on the broader issues at stake. She gives us a vivid portrait of one university town in transition and a case study for U.S. social history. A cast of local characters comes alive...Virtually every chapter has surprising, subtle turns in which Bailey's thesis of historical paradox and unintended consequences is amply demonstrated. --Maureen McLane, Chicago Tribune Reviews of this book: Published by the prestigious Harvard University Press, the book suggests that out-of-the-mainstream states such as Kansas actually were on the cutting edge of the nation's sexual revolution during the early 1960s. --Matt Moline, Capital-Journal Reviews of this book: "[Bailey] points out that those who claim the radical nature of the [sexual] revolution may be surprised by just how deep-seated and mainstream the origins of many of those revolutionary changes were." --Philip Godwin, M.D., Journal-World Reviews of this book: "Bailey examines the 20th-century 'sexual revolution' as it played out in the midwestern college town of Lawrence, Kansas...Bailey is especially perceptive on the ambivalent and conflicted relationship of both the feminist and gay rights movements to the sexual revolution. She also has strong sections on the birth control pill and other moremundane but long-lasting changes in American sexual culture...[A] fascinating and impressive book." --K. Blaser, Choice
The Sex Radicals
The Sex Radicals - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Sex Radicals write by Hal D. Sears. This book was released on 2021-10-29. The Sex Radicals available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This volume provides the first account of the pioneering efforts at sex reform in America from the Gilded Age to the Progressive era. Despite the atmosphere of extreme prudery and the existence of the Comstock laws after the Civil War, a group of radicals emerged to attack conventional beliefs about sex, from traditional marriage to women’s chattel status in society. These men and women had in common a direct, unrespectable, iconoclastic style. They put forth outrageous journalism and had a penchant for martyrdom and for using the courts to publicize their ideologies. From rare and generally unknown sources, Hal D. Sears pieced together the story of the sex radicals and their surprising ideas. Moses Harman, a minister turned abolitionist and freethinker, is a central figure in the narrative. His Lucifer, the Light Bearer, the only journal of sexual liberty published from the early 1880s to 1907, was dedicated to free love, sex education, women’s rights, and related causes. To a great degree Harman’s publication defines the limits of social dissent in the late nineteenth century. Other members of the sex radical circle included E. B. Foote, a medical doctor who made a fortune with a home medical book crammed with sex information; Edwin Walker and Lillian Harman, who became a cause célèbre among radicals when their jailhouse honeymoon in Kansas challenged the right of the state to regulate marriage; Elmina Slenker, who promoted a theory of sexual energy sublimation and the idea that women were the superior sex; and Lois Waisbrooker, Dora Forster, Lillie White, and other feminists who, almost a century ago, taught and preached the very ideas we hear today in the women’s movement. Of course, all these people got into trouble with the law, mostly through the machinations of their archvillain, Anthony Comstock. Sears examines Comstock’s powers of postal censorship and describes Comstock’s personal vendettas against sexual dissenters, particularly the free love philosopher Ezra Heywood. He gives a legal history of obscenity and explains the sex radicals’ significance in the emergence of obscenity law. Although the sex radicals attest the important reform vitality of provincial culture in late nineteenth-century America, until now they have been almost ignored by historians. Those who have studied sex radicalism at all, apart from its communitarian and sectarian aspects, have viewed it merely as a subsidiary of the more respectable feminist movement. In this book Sears gives careful consideration to the links between sex radicalism and spiritualism, feminism, anticlericalism, anarchism, and the free-thought movement. He presents sex radicalism as a separate and unique movement which illuminates new reaches of the Victorian landscape and establishes a tradition for present-day liberation trends.
The American Radical
The American Radical - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The American Radical write by Mary Jo Buhle. This book was released on 2013-02-01. The American Radical available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The American Radical tells the story of American democracy from the late 18th century to the present through the lives of the women and men who have fought to advance it.
Sex Radical Cinema
Sex Radical Cinema - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Sex Radical Cinema write by Carol Siegel. This book was released on 2015-11-18. Sex Radical Cinema available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In this provocative study of cinematic and televisual representations of "sex radicalism," Carol Siegel explores how representations of sexually explicit content on film have shaped American cultural visions of sex and sexual politics in the 21st century. Siegel distinguishes between a liberal approach to visual representations, which has over-emphasized normative equal opportunity while undervaluing our distinctive erotic selves, and a radical approach to visual representation, which portrays forbidden sexualities and desires. She illustrates how visual media participates in and even drives political policies related to pedophilia, prostitution, interracial relationships, and war. By examining such popular film and television shows as Mystic River, The Wire, Fifty Shades of Grey, Batman Returns, and the HBO hits, Sex and the City and Girls, Siegel takes the discussion of radical sex in the movies out of the margins of political discussions and puts it in the center, where, she argues, it has belonged all along.
