Desiring Revolution

By Jane Gerhard

Book Overview

There was a moment in the 1970s when sex was what mattered most to feminists. White middle-class women viewed sex as central to both their oppression and their liberation. Young women started to speak and write about the clitoris, orgasm and masturbation, and publishers and the news media jumped at the opportunity to disseminate their views. In Desiring Revolution, Gerhard asks why issues of sex and female pleasure came to matter so much to these second-wave feminists. In answering this question Gerhard reveals the diverse views of sexuality within feminism and shows how the radical ideas put forward by this generation of American women was a response to attempts to define and contain female sexuality going back to the beginning of the century.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231112041
• ISBN13: 9780231112048
• Release Date: June 2001
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.3"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Sex and Brains

This book does so many things well: it traces the intellectual history of ideas about female sexuality in pyschology and social thought, and it then discusses how feminists both challenged and used those ideas to make a feminist sexual revolution. But this important intellectual and cultural history is also incredibly fun to read. The chapter on "sex novels" is particularly innovative, and you'll learn more about the feminist "sex wars" here than anywhere else. Highly recommended!

Sex and Feminism

This is a wonderful book-- for both scholars and general readers. Relatively little has been written (yet) about the history of women's liberation, and Gerhard's analysis of how and why sexuality came to matter to second wave feminism fills an enormous gap; it is sure to become essential reading. Like Dan Horowitz's influential biography of Betty Friedan, this book offers an important intellectual history of second wave feminism-- from early in the 20th century onward, and from Freud to Erica Jong; with a light touch, then, Gerhard is making many insightful points about the methods and sources that historians use, and the relationship between theory and history. And, not the least, the stereotype of feminists as "anti-sex" simply falls apart in the face of this analysis. I teach US history, and my students have loved this smart and engaging book. But my mother in law loved it too!