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Rereading Sex by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
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Rereading Sex

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Rereading Sex by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
Paperback $18.95
Oct 14, 2003 | ISBN 9780375701863

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  • $18.95

    Oct 14, 2003 | ISBN 9780375701863

    Buy from Other Retailers:

Product Details

Praise

“Superb. . . . Full of fresh material, shrewd analysis and sound judgment… Horowitz’s enthusiasm and sense of fun are infectious.” —Los Angeles Times

“A fine new study of the debates over sexual knowledge in 19th century America. . . . Horowitz is a rigorous and supple thinker on inflammatory issues.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Completely fascinating. . . . Highly entertaining and accessible.” —The Women’s Review of Books

“A highly readable book that maintains high standards of scholarship and integrity.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Impressive and compelling . . . an intricate tapestry of nineteenth-century American sexual culture that fully reveals the power and complexity of sexuality and its profound impact on every facet of life.”—Booklist (starred review)

“In letting us eavesdrop on 19th-century discussions of sex, Horowitz demonstrates that while the language has certainly changed, many of the arguments have not.” —Providence Journal

“In Helen Horowitz’s wide-ranging account of the culture wars of the nineteenth century, anxieties that we live with today—about pornography, contraception, abortion, and free expression—turn out to have surprising histories.” —Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies

“Entertaining. . . . The huge number of philosophies and personalities that played a role in the debate, and made a foundation for our current sexual ideas, are brilliant distilled.” —The Lafayette Times

“Moves us beyond the old binary of Victorian lights and shadows, of prudery versus passion, to show the interwoven complexity of our first national conversation about sex.” —Patricia Cline Cohen, author of The Murder of Helen Jewett


Awards

Merle Curti Award WINNER 2003

Author Essay

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz on REREADING SEX

Rereading Sex puts the 1873 Comstock Law in the context of the nineteenth century’s quarrel about sex. At one level it tells a national story about sexual knowledge, based on materials about sex published between 1820 and 1880. In a complex conversation about the body, reproduction, and desire, four voices emerged: American vernacular sexual culture; evangelical Christianity; moral physiology reimaging the body, nerves, health, and the relation of mind and body; and a new sensibility placing sex at the center of life. Rereading the texts that animated this conversation demands reimagining sexuality in nineteenth-century America.

At another level, Rereading Sex tells a New York story. As the leading cultural center of the nation, it was the location of those who produced and distributed both erotica and works about reproduction and sexuality. New York was also a center of reform agitation about sexual questions. It had the courts that established the central traditions of legal practice dealing with obscene libel. Perhaps most tellingly, it had the critical social forces to battle what was perceived as obscenity. The Young Men’s Christian Association of New York came into being in the 1850s to offer young male clerks moral alternatives to the culture of sporting life. Confronting printed erotica, it turned to suppression. These efforts were successful after the Civil War in getting federal and state legislation to curb not only commercial erotica, but books on sexuality and sexual reform. Anthony Comstock became empowered to enforce the law as a federal agent of the U.S. Post Office.

In 1879 the constitutionality the law was affirmed, but a community of dissenters emerged, committed to keeping free speech alive in an era of suppression. What began as a New York struggle became a national battle over sexual knowledge and suppression that still resonates in our own time. American culture remains profoundly divided over questions of morality and its relation to government. At the dawn of the twenty-first century each day’s news presents reports of contemporary clashes over medical research, abortion, pornography, teenage sex education, and censorship of the Internet. New technology and new sources of sexual knowledge bring new threats to freedom of expression. As we read sex in our own times, echoes of America’s nineteeth century battles over sexual knowledge and suppression, one of our first culture wars, still reverberate in our ears.

–Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

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