This 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 behaviour in postwar America. The author 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 intricate 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 pill to pantry raids, the 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 and movements to help us better 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.
- ISBN10 0674802780
- ISBN13 9780674802780
- Publish Date 30 September 1999
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 11 June 2010
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Harvard University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 268
- Language English