Desiring revolution: second-wave feminism and the rewriting of American sexual thought, 1920 to 1982
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Desiring revolution: second-wave feminism and the rewriting of American sexual thought, 1920 to 1982
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Review
This fascinating book enriches history, women's/gender/sexuality studies, feminist theory, American studies curricula, and the libraries of advanced scholars. Gerhard deserves great credit for her skillful application of contemporary debates toward a creative interpretation of feminist and sexuality history.
(Judith A. Allen Journal of American History 1/1/2003)Gerhard delves into the history of expert ideas about appropriate reproductive and sexual behavior. Late nineteenth-century women activists, suffragists, and settlement-house workers challenged the idea of separate gendered spheres and showed they could live independently of men... Gerhard does a nice job of showing how the early radical feminists wanted to reconstruct heterosexuality to make it more focused on women's pleasure.
(Barbara Ryan NWSA Journal )Gerhard does a wonderful job of analyzing and situating the texts she has selected...This is a story well worth reading, teaching, and expanding.
(Deborah Cohler Journal of the History of Sexuality )About the Author
Jane Gerhard is lecturer in history and literature at Harvard University.
A Customer
This is a wonderful book | 
12/06/2001
12/06/2001
- 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!
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