Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution, an Unfettered History

Front Cover
Taylor & Francis, 2001 - History - 381 pages
When Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girlhit bookstores in 1962, the sexual revolution was launched and there was no turning back. Soon came the pill, the end of censorship, the advent of feminism, and the rise of commercial pornography. Our daily lives changed in an unprecedented time of sexual openness and experimentation.

Make Love, Not Waris the first serious treatment of the complicated events, ideas, and personalities that drove the sexual revolution forward. Based on first-hand accounts, diaries, interviews, and period research, it traces changes in private lives and public discourse from the fearful fifties to the first tremors of rebellion in the early sixties to the heady heyday of the revolution.

Bringing a fresh perspective to the turbulence of these decades, David Allyn argues that the sexual revolutionaries of the '60s and '70s, by telling the truth about their own histories and desires, forced all Americans to re-examine the very meaning of freedom.

Written with a historian's attention to nuance and a novelist's narrative drive, Make Love, Not Waris a provocative, vivid, and thoughtful account of one of the most captivating episodes in American history. Also includes an 8-page insert.
 

Contents

Single Girls Double Standard
10
Beatniks and Bathing Suits
23
The Pill A Prescription for Equality
30
Love the One Youre With
41
Obscenity on Trial
54
Strangers in a Strange Land The Harrad Experiment and Group Marriage
71
The Right to Marry Loving v Virginia
85
In Loco Parentis
93
Medicine and Morality
175
Why Do These Words Sound So Nasty?
184
Ideology Herbert Marcuse Norman O Brown and Fritz Perls
196
No Privacy Please Group Sex in the Seventies
206
The Joy of Sales The Commercialization of Sexual Freedom
228
Lesbian Liberation Equal But Separate
246
Sexual Freedom on Demand
256
Counterrevolution and Crisis
270

Strange Bedfellows Christian Clergy and the Sexual Revolution
108
Performing the Revolution
119
Sticky Fingers
135
Gay Liberation
145
The Golden Age of Sexual Science
166
Epilogue
295
Notes
301
Selected Bibliography
345
Index
367
Copyright

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About the author (2001)

David Allyn has a Ph.D. from Harvard and has taught history at Princeton. He is now a journalist and writer, and his articles have appeared in the Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The New York Daily News, and the Journal of American Studies. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

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