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The Sex Radicals - Free Love in High Victorian America (Paperback)
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The Sex Radicals - Free Love in High Victorian America (Paperback)
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This volume provides the first account of the pioneering efforts at
sex reform in America from the Gilded Age to the Progressive era.
Despite the atmosphere of extreme prudery and the existence of the
Comstock laws after the Civil War, a group of radicals emerged to
attack conventional beliefs about sex, from traditional marriage to
women's chattel status in society. These men and women had in
common a direct, unrespectable, iconoclastic style. They put forth
outrageous journalism and had a penchant for martyrdom and for
using the courts to publicize their ideologies. From rare and
generally unknown sources, Hal D. Sears pieced together the story
of the sex radicals and their surprising ideas. Moses Harman, a
minister turned abolitionist and freethinker, is a central figure
in the narrative. His Lucifer, the Light Bearer, the only journal
of sexual liberty published from the early 1880s to 1907, was
dedicated to free love, sex education, women's rights, and related
causes. To a great degree Harman's publication defines the limits
of social dissent in the late nineteenth century. Other members of
the sex radical circle included E. B. Foote, a medical doctor who
made a fortune with a home medical book crammed with sex
information; Edwin Walker and Lillian Harman, who became a cause
cElEbre among radicals when their jailhouse honeymoon in Kansas
challenged the right of the state to regulate marriage; Elmina
Slenker, who promoted a theory of sexual energy sublimation and the
idea that women were the superior sex; and Lois Waisbrooker, Dora
Forster, Lillie White, and other feminists who, almost a century
ago, taught and preached the very ideas we hear today in the
women's movement. Of course, all these people got into trouble with
the law, mostly through the machinations of their archvillain,
Anthony Comstock. Sears examines Comstock's powers of postal
censorship and describes Comstock's personal vendettas against
sexual dissenters, particularly the free love philosopher Ezra
Heywood. He gives a legal history of obscenity and explains the sex
radicals' significance in the emergence of obscenity law. Although
the sex radicals attest the important reform vitality of provincial
culture in late nineteenth-century America, until now they have
been almost ignored by historians. Those who have studied sex
radicalism at all, apart from its communitarian and sectarian
aspects, have viewed it merely as a subsidiary of the more
respectable feminist movement. In this book Sears gives careful
consideration to the links between sex radicalism and spiritualism,
feminism, anticlericalism, anarchism, and the free-thought
movement. He presents sex radicalism as a separate and unique
movement which illuminates new reaches of the Victorian landscape
and establishes a tradition for present-day liberation trends.
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