A lively, scholarly, and often startling exploration of 19th-century American attitudes toward sexuality -- what we felt, thought, wrote, and said about the human body; about love, lust, intercourse, masturbation, contraception, and abortion; about the power of sexual words and images.Horowitz shows us a many-voiced America in which an earthy acceptance of desire and sexual expression collided with the prohibitions broadcast from pulpit and printed page by evangelical Christian elements. She describes the new sensibility that placed sex at the center of life; visionaries like Robert Owen, espousing free love, and the lively new commerce in erotica -- including newspapers like The Sunday Flash and, most famously, The National Police Gazette (which featured a legal way to write explicitly about sex). We see a rising opposition instigated by conservative New Yorkers who feared the corruption of young male clerks living in boardinghouses, deprived of parental influence. And we see how this movement led into an era of suppression -- pitting Anthony Comstock, who succeeded in banning sexual subject matter from the mails, against the new dissenters committed to free speech -- and into the opening battles of the national cultural wars that continue to this day.

From bawdy talk to evangelical sermons, and from celebrations of free love to prosecutions for obscenity, nineteenth-century America encompassed a far broader range of sexual attitudes and ideas than the Victorian stereotype would have us believe. In Rereading Sex, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz lets us listen to the national conversation about sex in the nineteenth century and hear voices that resonate in our own time. Probing court records, pamphlets, and “sporting men’s” magazines, Horowitz shows us a many-voiced America in which an earthy acceptance of desire and sexual expression collided with prohibitions broadcast from the pulpit. We encounter fascinating reformers like Victoria Woodhull, who advocated free love and became the first woman to run for president; faddists like Sylvester Graham, who obsessed about the dangers of masturbation; and moral crusaders like Anthony Comstock, who succeeded in banning sexual subject matter from the mails. We also see how newspapers like the Sunday Flash treated prostitutes like celebrities and how the National Police Gazette found a legal way to write about explicity about sex through crime reports that read like gossip columns. Employing an encyclopedic knowledge artfully rendered, Horowitz brings to the fore a wide spectrum of attitudes and a debate echoed in the culture wars of today.

Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle throughout millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behaviour: sex. From the savage impalement of an Ancient Mesopotamian adulteress to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for 'gross indecency' in 1895, Eric Berkowitz evokes the entire sweep of Western sex law. The cast of Sex and Punishment is as varied as the forms taken by human desire itself: royal mistresses, gay charioteers, medieval transvestites, lonely goat-lovers, prostitutes of all stripes and London rent boys. Each of them had forbidden sex, and each was judged – and justice, as Berkowitz shows – rarely had anything to do with it.

"Marina Warner begins with the gospels, noting the slight allusions to Mary, and the curious confusions between the two women of that name. She points out the falsities, fables and manifest fabrications that have shaped mariolatry. This intriguing and intelligent book is an attempt to explain the origins, growth, appeal and persistence of the Virgin's cult. The narrative is a rich, allusive tapestry set in a framework of theological commentary." -New Society

"Teaching Moral Sex is the first comprehensive study to focus on the role of religion in the history of public sex education in the United States. It examines religious contributions to national sex education organizations from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, highlighting issues of public health, public education, family, and the role of the state. It details how public sex education was created through the collaboration of religious sex educators-primarily liberal Protestants, along with some Catholics and Reform Jews-with "men of science," namely physicians, biology professors, and social scientists. Slominski argues that the work of early religious sex educators laid foundations for both sides of contemporary controversies regarding comprehensive sexuality education and abstinence-only education. In other words, instead of casting religion as merely an opponent of sex education, this research shows how deeply embedded religion has been in sex education history and how this legacy has shaped terms of current debates. By focusing on religion, this book introduces a new cast of characters into sex education history, including Quaker and Unitarian social purity reformers, the Young Men's Christian Association, military chaplains, the Federal Council of Churches, and the National Council of Churches. These religious sex educators made sex education more acceptable to the public and created the groundwork for recent debates through their strategic combination of progressive and restrictive approaches to sexuality. Their contributions helped to spread sex education and influenced major shifts within the movement, including the mid-century embrace of family life education"--

First broadcast on HBO in 1998, Sex and the City quickly became a mainstream success. Following four women who navigate the promise and peril of social, political, and sexual relationships in New York, the series caused a stir in the popular media. Academia also responded with a remarkable body of criticism for such an apparently trivial program. But more than ten years after the show ended, there is still much more to say about this cultural phenomenon that spawned two film sequels. In Talking Dirty on Sex and the City: Romance, Intimacy, Friendship, Beatriz Oria explores the discourses surrounding the series from a sociological point of view. Specifically, this book focuses on the conventions of the romantic comedy genre and how its familiar fictional world articulates issues of intimacy, gender identity, and interpersonal relationships. Oria considers how generic conventions employed by the show affect discourses on intimacy and how interpersonal relationships at the turn of the century have not only been represented but also fashioned through a relevant popular-culture text. The author also explores such elements as romantic versus democratic love, the representation of female sexuality, and new family models. With an interdisciplinary approach, this book touches on many different areas, including sociology, psychology, gender studies, and media studies. Aimed at a broad academic audience, Talking Dirty on Sex and the City will also appeal to longtime fans, who are no doubt still gossiping about the show.

"Drawing upon census data, trade periodicals devoted to stenography and court reporting, the writings of educational reformers, and fiction, Srole allows us to better understand the roles that gender and work played in the formation of middle-class identity. Clearly written and thoroughly researched, her book reminds us of the contradictions that both men and women faced as they navigated changes in the labor market and sought to realize a modern professional identity." ---Thomas Augst, New York University Transcribing Class and Gender explores the changing meanings of clerical work in nineteenth-century America, focusing on the discourse surrounding that work. At a time when shorthand transcription was the primary method of documenting business and legal communications and transactions, most stenographers were men, but changing technology saw the emergence of women in the once male-dominated field. Carole Srole argues that this shift placed stenographers in a unique position to construct a new image of the professional man and woman and, in doing so, to redefine middle- and working-class identities. Many male court reporters emphasized their professionalism, portraying themselves as educated language experts as a way to elevate themselves above the growing numbers of female and working-class stenographers and typewriter operators. Meanwhile, women in the courts and offices were confronting the derogatory image of the so-called Typewriter Girl who cared more about her looks, clothing, and marriage prospects than her job. Like males in the field, women responded by fashioning a gendered professional image---one that served to combat this new version of degraded female labor while also maintaining traditional ideals of femininity. The study is unique in the way it reads and analyzes popular fiction, stenography trade magazines, the archives of professional associations, and writings by educational reformers to provide new perspectives on this history. The author challenges the common assumption that men and women clerks had separate work cultures and demonstrates how each had to balance elements of manhood and womanhood in the drive toward professionalism and the construction of a new middle-class image. Transcribing Class and Gender joins the recent scholarship that employs cultural studies approaches to class and gender without abandoning the social history valuation of workers' experiences. Carole Srole is Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. Photo: A female stenographer working for an actuary in 1897. Courtesy Metlife Archives.