Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality (Women in American History)
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: February 21, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9780252028045
Subjects: Women's studies; Social Science; Sociology; Human Sexuality; Social History; Women's Studies - History; Social Science / Women's Studies; Women's Studies - General; 19th century; Free love; History; Sex customs; Sexual ethics; United States
First sentence: IN SEPTEMBER 1855, Henry B. Blackwell spent a Sunday afternoon reading the recently published novel Mary Lyndon; or Revelations of a life.
Description: "In charting the growth of the sex radical movement, Joanne E. Passet draws on a host of documents from the period - letters, periodicals, lectures, and pamphlets - to establish a strong link between the rise of print culture and the ability of citizens, especially women, to build geographically dispersed ideological communities. The women and men who expressed their unorthodox ideas through these media advanced models of sexuality that challenged the restrictive mores of society at large.

Passet shows that the majority of correspondents who participated in the sex radical movement resided in the Midwest and the Great Plains states, where ideas of individual freedom and sovereignty resonated particularly strongly.".

"This book reminds us that the call for woman suffrage - which was national, centralized, and widely visible by 1900 - was only one of several strands of women's activism during this period. Passet vividly demonstrates how this sex radical movement placed discussions of sex and sexuality squarely in the public domain, establishing the foundations upon which later generations of women's rights crusaders and feminists would build."--BOOK JACKET.