Desiring Revolution

Second-wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982

Author: Jane F. Gerhard
ISBN: 023111205X

There was a moment in the 1970s when sex was what mattered most to feminists. White middle-class women viewed sex as central to both their oppression and their liberation. Young women started to speak and write about the clitoris, orgasm, and masturbation, and publishers and the news media jumped at the opportunity to disseminate their views. In Desiring Revolution, Gerhard asks why issues of sex and female pleasure came to matter so much to these "second-wave feminists." In answering this question Gerhard reveals the diverse views of sexuality within feminism and shows how the radical ideas put forward by this generation of American women was a response to attempts to define and contain female sexuality going back to the beginning of the century.Gerhard begins by showing how the "marriage experts" of the first half of the twentieth century led people to believe that female sexuality was bound up in bearing children. Ideas about normal, white, female heterosexuality began to change, ho

Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publish Date: 2001

Subjects: Psychology / Human Sexuality, Social Science / Feminism & Feminist Theory, Social Science / Women's Studies, Social Science / Gender Studies

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: Sexuality)