With this colorful collection of documents, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz overturns the monolithic picture of Victorian sexual repression to reveal four contending views at play during the antebellum period: earthy American folk wisdom, the anti-flesh teachings of evangelical Christianity, moral reform grounded in science, and the utopian free love movement. Horowitz's introduction discusses how these diverse views shaped the antebellum conversation about the moral, social, and physical implications of sex and reflected the larger cultural and economic changes of this period of rapid industrialization and urban migration. Helpful headnotes contextualize this selection of hard-to-find documents, which includes scientific manuals, religious pamphlets, advertisements, and popular fiction. Contemporary illustrations, a chronology, and a bibliography foster students' understanding of antebellum sexual attitudes.

The public discussion of sexuality in America first came about in the 1820s. Predictably, Americans diverged considerably on how to approach the controversial topic. Folk wisdom, current scientific beliefs, and the teachings of evangelical Christianity all shaped the antebellum conversation about the moral, social and physical implications of sex. In her introduction, Professor Horowitz takes American sexual history beyond the boundaries of the twentieth century and elucidates the complex issues surrounding nineteenth-century debates and dialogue. Helpful headnotes contextualize this colorful selection of hard-to-find documents, which includes medical articles, religious pamphlets, advertisements and propaganda, and popular literature. Contemporary illustrations, a chronology, and a bibliography foster students understanding of antebellum sexual knowledge.

The public discussion of sexuality in America first came about in the 1820s. Predictably, Americans diverged considerably on how to approach the controversial topic. Folk wisdom, current scientific beliefs, and the teachings of evangelical Christianity all shaped the antebellum conversation about the moral, social and physical implications of sex. In her introduction, Professor Horowitz takes American sexual history beyond the boundaries of the twentieth century and elucidates the complex issues surrounding nineteenth-century debates and dialogue. Helpful headnotes contextualize this colorful selection of hard-to-find documents, which includes medical articles, religious pamphlets, advertisements and propaganda, and popular literature. Contemporary illustrations, a chronology, and a bibliography foster students’ understanding of antebellum sexual knowledge.

With this book, Nancy Isenberg illuminates the origins of the women's rights movement. Rather than herald the singular achievements of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, she examines the confluence of events and ideas_before and after 1848_that, in her vie

Expanding our understanding of the possibilities and challenges inherent in the expression of same-sex desire before the Civil War, David Greven identifies a pattern of what he calls ’gender protest’ and sexual possibility recurring in antebellum works. He suggests that major authors such as Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne consciously sought to represent same-sex desire in their writings. Focusing especially on conceptions of the melancholia of gender identification and shame, Greven argues that same-sex desire was inextricably enmeshed in scenes of gender-role strain, as exemplified in the extent to which The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym depicts masculine identity adrift and in disarray. Greven finds similarly compelling representations of gender protest in Fuller’s exploration of the crisis of gendered identity in Summer on the Lakes, in Melville’s representation of Redburn’s experience of gender nonconformity, and in Hawthorne’s complicated delineation of desire in The Scarlet Letter. As Greven shows, antebellum authors not only took up the taboo subjects of same-sex desire and female sexuality, but were adept in their use of a variety of rhetorical means for expressing the inexpressible.