Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America - Hardcover

D'Emilio, John; Freedman, Estelle B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060158557 ISBN 13: 9780060158552

Publisher: Harper and Row, 1988

Synopsis

Traces changing American attitudes towards human sexuality, discusses social issues involving race, gender, class, and sexual preference, and looks at crusaders for sexual change

About this title

From the Publisher:

A fascinating, hard look at the history of American attitudes toward sex. "A grown-up book about a subject about which we can be astonishingly childish."--Washington Post Book World

From Publishers Weekly:

The history of sexuality in the U.S. is not a progressive jump from repression to freedom, the authors maintain. Instead, sexuality has been continually remolded in each era, reflecting the dictates of economics, family structure and politics. This interpretive framework lends coherence to a sweeping survey peopled with anti-prostitution crusaders and free-love advocates, celibate Shakers and swingers, vice cops and sexologists. Today's commercialized sexuality, promising personal fulfillment through intimate relations, is contrasted with the family-centered, reproductive sexuality of the prudish New England colonists who nevertheless produced bastards and engaged in adultery, sodomy and rape. The authors cram into 400 pages balanced discussions of racial sex-stereotyping, Chinese slave rings, abortion, same-sex relationships, women's rights and AIDS-engendered conservatism. D'Emilio is the author of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities; Freedman wrote The Lesbian Issue. Illustrations.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper and Row
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0060158557
• ISBN 13: 9780060158552
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 428