Major Problems in American History series introduces the readers to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in U.S. history. This volume contains a number of chapters with documents and essays about: Sexual cultures and encounters in the New World, regulating sexuality in the Anglo-American colonies, gender conflict and sex reform in the early nineteenth century, sexuality, race, and violence in slavery and freedom, love and initimacy in nineteenth-century America, free love, free speech, and sex consorship, prostitution and working-class sexuality, politics of reproduction, heterosexual norms and homosexual identities in popular culture, open secrets in Cold War cinema, sexual revolution, sexually transmitted diseases, and sexual identities, family matters, and border crossings in contemporary America.
This collection brings together eleven essays--eight previously published and three new--that document the evolving relationship between academic feminism and political feminism as Freedman has studied and lived it. .Following an introduction that presents a map of the personal and intellectual trajectory of Freedman's work, the first section of essays, on the origins and strategies of women's activism in U.S. history, reiterates the importance of valuing women in a society that has long devalued their contributions. The second section, on the maintenance of sexual boundaries, explores the malleability of both sexual identities and sexual politics. Underlying the collection is an inquiry into the changing meanings of gender, sexuality, and politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries along with a concern for applying the insights of women's history broadly, from the classroom to the courthouse