Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: The Repoductive Matrix, 1600-1800 1. Cultural Diversity in the Era of Settlement 2. Family Life and the Refulation of Deviance 3. Seeds of Change Part II: Divided Passions, 1780-1900 4. Within the Family 5. Race and Sexuality 6. Outside the Family 7. Sexual Politics Part III: Toward a New Sexual Order, 1880-1930 8. "Civilized Morality" Under Stress 9. Crusades for Sexual Order 10. Breaking with the Past Part IV: The Rise and Fall of Sexual Liberalism, 1920 to the Present 11. Beyond Reproduction 12. Redrawing the Boundaries 13. Sexual Revolutions 14. The Sexualized Society 15. The Cntemporary Political Crisis Afterword Notes Selected Bibliography Index

Reviews

The history of sexuality in the U.S. is not a progressive jump from repression to freedom, the authors maintain. Instead, sexuality has been continually remolded in each era, reflecting the dictates of economics, family structure and politics. This interpretive framework lends coherence to a sweeping survey peopled with anti-prostitution crusaders and free-love advocates, celibate Shakers and swingers, vice cops and sexologists. Today's commercialized sexuality, promising personal fulfillment through intimate relations, is contrasted with the family-centered, reproductive sexuality of the prudish New England colonists who nevertheless produced bastards and engaged in adultery, sodomy and rape. The authors cram into 400 pages balanced discussions of racial sex-stereotyping, Chinese slave rings, abortion, same-sex relationships, women's rights and AIDS-engendered conservatism. D'Emilio is the author of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities; Freedman wrote The Lesbian Issue. Illustrations. (April)

An irony of historical writing is that sexualityone of the most important factors in everyone's livesis perhaps the least discussed. Gender relations, the purpose of sexual intercourse, and the meaning of marriage shape the daily lives of most adults, yet historians often ignore such matters. Now this oversight is rectified by an excellent survey of sexuality in America from colonial days to the 1980s. The commercialization of sex, its use as a means of social control, and the search for its place in our lives are presented here clearly and readably. Highly recommended for most academic and public libraries. Pat Ensor, Indiana State Univ. Lib., Terre Haute