Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America

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.

• City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920
• Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
• Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York
• The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America
• The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Communities in Twentieth Century America (Phoenix Book)
• No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (Oxford Paperbacks)
• Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy (Galaxy Books)
• This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)
• Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, Third Edition
• Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality (The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era)