First published in 1998. In June 1831 the New York Magdalen Society published its first annual report. The Society charged that widespread sexual deviation, primarily in the form of prostitution, existed in New York City. The Magdalen Report claimed that approximately ten thousand women earned their livings as public prostitutes, and another ten thousand were “private or part-time prostitutes.” The Magdalen Society’s establishment and the subsequent publication of the Magdalen Report marked the beginning of a crusade in New York City to curtail sexual deviation and this study looks at the changes and reforms that took place.

The First of Causes to Our Sex is a study of the first movement in the United States for social change by and for women. Female moral reform in the 1830s and '40s was a campaign to abolish sexual vice and the sexual double standard, and to promote sexual abstinence among the young as they entered the marriage market. The movement has earned a place in U.S. women's history, but most research has focused on it as an urban phenomenon, and sought its significance in relation to the cause of women's rights or to the regulation of prostitution. This study explores the appeal of moral reform to rural women, who were the vast majority of its constituency, and sees it as a response to seminal changes in family formation and family size in the context of an increasingly market-oriented and mobile society. It was led by Yankee women who were fired by Second Great Awakening revivals and supported by reformist clergy.

The story of how Americans came to drink milk For over a century, America's nutrition authorities have heralded milk as "nature's perfect food," as "indispensable" and "the most complete food." These milk "boosters" have ranged from consumer activists, to government nutritionists, to the American Dairy Council and its ubiquitous milk moustache ads. The image of milk as wholesome and body-building has a long history, but is it accurate? Recently, within the newest social movements around food, milk has lost favor. Vegan anti-milk rhetoric portrays the dairy industry as cruel to animals and milk as bad for humans. Recently, books with titles like, "Milk: The Deadly Poison," and "Don't Drink Your Milk" have portrayed milk as toxic and unhealthy. Controversies over genetically-engineered cows and questions about antibiotic residue have also prompted consumers to question whether the milk they drink each day is truly good for them. In Nature's Perfect Food Melanie Dupuis illuminates these questions by telling the story of how Americans came to drink milk. We learn how cow's milk, which was associated with bacteria and disease became a staple of the American diet. Along the way we encounter 19th century evangelists who were convinced that cow's milk was the perfect food with divine properties, brewers whose tainted cow feed poisoned the milk supply, and informal wetnursing networks that were destroyed with the onset of urbanization and industrialization. Informative and entertaining, Nature's Perfect Food will be the standard work on the history of milk.

Well known as an abolitionist stronghold before the Civil War, Massachusetts had taken steps to eliminate slavery as early as the 1780s. Nevertheless, a powerful racial caste system still held sway, reinforced by a law prohibiting “amalgamation”—marriage between whites and blacks. The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts chronicles a grassroots movement to overturn the state’s ban on interracial unions. Assembling information from court and church records, family histories, and popular literature, Amber D. Moulton recreates an unlikely collaboration of reformers who sought to rectify what, in the eyes of the state’s antislavery constituency, appeared to be an indefensible injustice. Initially, activists argued that the ban provided a legal foundation for white supremacy in Massachusetts. But laws that enforced racial hierarchy remained popular even in Northern states, and the movement gained little traction. To attract broader support, the reformers recalibrated their arguments along moral lines, insisting that the prohibition on interracial unions weakened the basis of all marriage, by encouraging promiscuity, prostitution, and illegitimacy. Through trial and error, reform leaders shaped an appeal that ultimately drew in Garrisonian abolitionists, equal rights activists, antislavery evangelicals, moral reformers, and Yankee legislators, all working to legalize interracial marriage. This pre–Civil War effort to overturn Massachusetts’ antimiscegenation law was not a political aberration but a crucial chapter in the deep history of the African American struggle for equal rights, on a continuum with the civil rights movement over a century later.

Nineteenth-century America saw numerous campaigns against masturbation, which was said to cause illness, insanity, and even death. Riotous Flesh explores women’s leadership of those movements, with a specific focus on their rhetorical, social, and political effects, showing how a desire to transform the politics of sex created unexpected alliances between groups that otherwise had very different goals. As April R. Haynes shows, the crusade against female masturbation was rooted in a generally shared agreement on some major points: that girls and women were as susceptible to masturbation as boys and men; that “self-abuse” was rooted in a lack of sexual information; and that sex education could empower women and girls to master their own bodies. Yet the groups who made this education their goal ranged widely, from “ultra” utopians and nascent feminists to black abolitionists. Riotous Flesh explains how and why diverse women came together to popularize, then institutionalize, the condemnation of masturbation, well before the advent of sexology or the professionalization of medicine.

div When it was published twenty-five years ago, Catharine MacKinnon’s pathbreaking work Sexual Harassment of Working Women had a major impact on the development of sexual harassment law. The U.S. Supreme Court accepted her theory of sexual harassment in 1986. Here MacKinnon collaborates with eminent authorities to appraise what has been accomplished in the field and what still needs to be done. An introductory essay by Reva Siegel considers how sexual harassment came to be regulated as sex discrimination. Contributors discuss how law can best address sexual harassment; the importance and definition of consent and unwelcomeness; issues of same-sex harassment; questions of institutional responsibility for sexual harassment in both employment and education settings; considerations of freedom of speech; effects of sexual harassment doctrine on gender and racial justice; and transnational approaches to the problem. An afterword by MacKinnon assesses the changes wrought by sexual harassment law in the past quarter century. /DIV

In Reforming Women, Lisa Shaver locates the emergence of a distinct women’s rhetoric and feminist consciousness in the American Female Moral Reform Society. Established in 1834, the society took aim at prostitution, brothels, and the lascivious behavior increasingly visible in America’s industrializing cities. In particular, female moral reformers contested the double standard that overlooked promiscuous behavior in men while harshly condemning women for the same offense. Their ardent rhetoric resonated with women across the country. With its widely-read periodical and auxiliary societies representing more than 50,000 women, the American Female Moral Reform Society became the first national reform movement organized, led, and comprised solely by women. Drawing on an in-depth examination of the group’s periodical, Reforming Women delineates essential rhetorical tactics including women’s strategic use of gender, the periodical press, anger, presence, auxiliary societies, and institutional rhetoric—tactics women’s reform efforts would use throughout the nineteenth century. Almost two centuries later, female moral reformers’ rhetoric resonates today as our society continues to struggle with different moral expectations for men and women.