{"product_id":"rereading-sex-battles-over-sexual-knowledge-and-suppression-in-nineteenthcentury-america-9780375401923","title":"Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America","description":"\u003cp\u003eA lively  scholarly  and often startling exploration of nineteenth-century American attitudes toward sexualitywhat we felt  thought  wrote  and said about the human body; about love  lust  intercourse  masturbation  contraception  and abortion; about the power of sexual words and images.  Horowitz shows us a many-voiced America in which an earthy acceptance of desire and sexual expression collided with the prohibitions broadcast from the pulpit and the printed page by evangelical Christian elements. She describes the new sensibility of agitators like Victoria Woodhull placing sex at the center of life  visionaries like Robert Owen and Frances Wright espousing free love  faddists like Sylvester Graham obsessing about the dangers of masturbation  a country physician writing the first scientifically grounded book on contraception  the lively new commerce in eroticaincluding newspapers such as the Sunday Flash and  most famous  the National Police Gazette (which featured a legal way to write explicitly about sex). We see a rising opposition instigated by conservative New Yorkers who feared the corruption of young male clerks living in boardinghouses  deprived of parental influence. And we see how this movement led into an era of suppressionpitting Anthony Comstock  who succeeded in banning sexual subject matter from the mails  against the new dissenters committed to free speechan early battle of the national cultural war that continues to this day.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45953196490805,"sku":"ByrdShop_037540192X","price":25.08,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780375401923.jpg?v=1788181352","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/rereading-sex-battles-over-sexual-knowledge-and-suppression-in-nineteenthcentury-america-9780375401923","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}