Author: Hal D. Sears Publisher: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 0700631690 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
This volume provides the first account of the pioneering efforts at sex reform in America from the Gilded Age to the Progressive era. Despite the atmosphere of extreme prudery and the existence of the Comstock laws after the Civil War, a group of radicals emerged to attack conventional beliefs about sex, from traditional marriage to women’s chattel status in society. These men and women had in common a direct, unrespectable, iconoclastic style. They put forth outrageous journalism and had a penchant for martyrdom and for using the courts to publicize their ideologies. From rare and generally unknown sources, Hal D. Sears pieced together the story of the sex radicals and their surprising ideas. Moses Harman, a minister turned abolitionist and freethinker, is a central figure in the narrative. His Lucifer, the Light Bearer, the only journal of sexual liberty published from the early 1880s to 1907, was dedicated to free love, sex education, women’s rights, and related causes. To a great degree Harman’s publication defines the limits of social dissent in the late nineteenth century. Other members of the sex radical circle included E. B. Foote, a medical doctor who made a fortune with a home medical book crammed with sex information; Edwin Walker and Lillian Harman, who became a cause célèbre among radicals when their jailhouse honeymoon in Kansas challenged the right of the state to regulate marriage; Elmina Slenker, who promoted a theory of sexual energy sublimation and the idea that women were the superior sex; and Lois Waisbrooker, Dora Forster, Lillie White, and other feminists who, almost a century ago, taught and preached the very ideas we hear today in the women’s movement. Of course, all these people got into trouble with the law, mostly through the machinations of their archvillain, Anthony Comstock. Sears examines Comstock’s powers of postal censorship and describes Comstock’s personal vendettas against sexual dissenters, particularly the free love philosopher Ezra Heywood. He gives a legal history of obscenity and explains the sex radicals’ significance in the emergence of obscenity law. Although the sex radicals attest the important reform vitality of provincial culture in late nineteenth-century America, until now they have been almost ignored by historians. Those who have studied sex radicalism at all, apart from its communitarian and sectarian aspects, have viewed it merely as a subsidiary of the more respectable feminist movement. In this book Sears gives careful consideration to the links between sex radicalism and spiritualism, feminism, anticlericalism, anarchism, and the free-thought movement. He presents sex radicalism as a separate and unique movement which illuminates new reaches of the Victorian landscape and establishes a tradition for present-day liberation trends.
Author: Joanne Ellen Passet Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 9780252028045 Category : Feminism Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
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.".
Author: Dora Forster Publisher: Theclassics.Us ISBN: 9781230272283 Category : Languages : en Pages : 20
Book Description
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ... IX. WHAT MADE EMANCIPATION POSSIBLE? This chapter in history might well be headed "The American Woman to the Rescue," so entirely is this epoch, in which all thoughtful people are earnestly desiring a science of sex as a guide to conduct, bound up with the circumstances, social prestige, and aspirations of the feminine portion of the great western nation. Jane Bull has fought a good fight too, for the education and larger life of women, and thus also of men; and this in spite of every drawback of surroundings and tradition. The average Englishman has hindered her in every way; but according to a characteristic of that singular nation, that its exceptionally able men are distinguished by exactly the qualities in which the generality are lacking, the chivalry, Imagination and clear-sighted logic of Shelley, John Stuart Mill, the still unknown medical author of "The Elements of Social Science,"--a book of many editions and often translated.--Edward Carpenter, and, to include an Irishman, Bernard Shaw, have been an inspiration both in and beyond their own country. America, however, is the field in which the sex problem will be worked out both theoretically and practically. "Westward the course of empire takes its way," but it has been left for the conquerors of the most western continent to exhibit a conquest not before known in the history of mankind; for the character, the future, and the very existence of the American nations will be, and largely is, in the power of women. And if this power proves blind at first, and hostile to the interests of the race, the man's weapons--fist, rifle, treachery or diplomacy--will not avail him; the woman's weapons must be borrowed, patience and moral suasion, in the use of which man is yet but a child....
Author: Carol Siegel Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253018110 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
In this provocative study of cinematic and televisual representations of "sex radicalism," Carol Siegel explores how representations of sexually explicit content on film have shaped American cultural visions of sex and sexual politics in the 21st century. Siegel distinguishes between a liberal approach to visual representations, which has over-emphasized normative equal opportunity while undervaluing our distinctive erotic selves, and a radical approach to visual representation, which portrays forbidden sexualities and desires. She illustrates how visual media participates in and even drives political policies related to pedophilia, prostitution, interracial relationships, and war. By examining such popular film and television shows as Mystic River, The Wire, Fifty Shades of Grey, Batman Returns, and the HBO hits, Sex and the City and Girls, Siegel takes the discussion of radical sex in the movies out of the margins of political discussions and puts it in the center, where, she argues, it has belonged all along.
Author: Dora Forster Publisher: Forgotten Books ISBN: 9781330035160 Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 66
Book Description
Excerpt from Sex Radicalism The mistake of Christendom, above all other mistakes, is its failure to give a rational education to children in regard to sex. And growing out of this fundamental mistake the crime of Christendom, above all its other crimes, is its treatment of womanhood and motherhood in the sex-relation. Out of this mistake of mistakes, out of this crime of crimes, more than from any other cause or causes, have grown up the inequalities the despotisms, the slaveries that now curse all the nations of the world calling themselves Christian. Much the same impeachment will hold as against the non-Christian or Pagan nations of the world, but when the comparative advancement in general intelligence of the so-called Christian nations is considered the above charges are more conspicuously true, more pre-eminently true, as against the latter named nations or communities of people. Havelock Ellis, the distinguished Sexologist of England, is quoted as saying: "I regard sex as the central problem of life. And now that the problem of religion has been practically settled, and that the problem of labor has at least been placed on a practical foundation, the question of sex - with the social questions that rest on it - stands for solution. Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex - so at least it seems to me." Doctor Ellis puts it mildly. If we can not "reverence life" without a knowledge of sex, then the murders, wholesale and retail, for which Christian nations are conspicuously notorious, are directly traceable to a lack of knowledge of sex. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Author: Dora Forster Publisher: Forgotten Books ISBN: 9780483141391 Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 66
Book Description
Excerpt from Sex Radicalism Out of this mistake of mistakes, out of this crime of crimes, more than from any other cause or causes, have grown up the inequalities the despotisms, the slaveries that now curse all the nations of the world calling themselves Christian. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Author: Dora Forster Publisher: TGS Publishing ISBN: 9781610331357 Category : Languages : en Pages : 56
Book Description
First men let them VOTE, then they wanted orgasms!!! The author is pushing the limits of equality for women; that have been legislated by men for them for their own good. Dora wants sex equality in the bedroom, as well at the voting booth.