Desiring Revolution: Second-wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 023111205X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
Gerhard begins by showing how the "marriage experts" of the first half of the twentieth century led people to believe that female sexuality was bound up in bearing children. Ideas about normal, white, female heterosexuality began to change, however, in the 1950s and 1960s with the widely reported, and somewhat shocking, studies of Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, whose research spoke frankly about female sexual anatomy, practices, and pleasures.
Gerhard then focuses on the sexual revolution between 1968 and 1975. Examining the work of Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Erica Jong, and Kate Millet, among many others, she reveals how little the diverse representatives of this movement shared other than the desire that women gain control of their own sexual destinies. Finally, Gerhard examines the divisions that opened up between anti-pornography (or "anti-sex") feminists and anti-censorship (or "pro-sex") radicals.
At once erudite and refreshingly accessible, Desiring Revolution provides the first full account of the unfolding of the feminist sexual revolution.
which it announced its grant of $525,000 to Union Theological Seminary, one of Kinsey’s primary critics. It was the largest single grant the foundation had ever made. The university took over what it could of financing the institute and Kinsey’s research. But his research on Americans’ sexual behavior ground to a halt as the institute struggled to regain its footing in the wake of its notoriety and Kinsey’s failing health.50 To the Laboratory: Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response William
relationship between the sexes, to ratify traditional roles, and to validate temperamental differences.39 Kate Millett’s 1969 best-seller, Sexual Politics, put patriarchy on the political map. In it, Millett offered a critique of Freudianism that shared important features with the one offered by Friedan six years earlier. Both saw Freudian psychoanalysis as playing a central role in the backlash 92 politicizing pleasure against women of the 1940s and 1950s. Like Friedan, who complained that
lines between straight and lesbian women, between pleasure and danger, liberation and exploitation, in the name of expanding women’s self-determination. They also succeeded in infusing female sexuality with the symbolism of women’s full social, political and sexual equality unbounded by either difference from or similarity to men. For these women, then, the third term between heterosexuality and homosexuality was feminism. The radicalism of feminist sex thought during this period of ferment and
when she learned that being a girl harnessed her to all things domestic. Wanting nothing but to be a defensive left tackle for the Oakland Raiders, the thirteen-year-old Ginny articulated the “bitter lesson” feminists already knew: “Women led their lives through men. . . . I must have suspected what was cooking, deep in the test kitchen of my unconscious, because my football playing had the desperation of the doomed to it. My tackles were performed with the fervor of a soldier making love on the
revolution launched by the charity girls.14 These young women were eager to distinguish themselves from suffragists and settlement house workers, whom they viewed as spinsters antagonistic toward men. Yet, like them, they rejected motherhood as women’s sole purpose. Flappers, though, were decidedly apolitical. Basking in the successes of the suffrage movement, many young middle-class women of the 1920s assumed sexual equality had been 18 modern women and modern marriage achieved and set out