| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California. By Albert L. Hurtado. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. xxx, 173 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8263-1953-X. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8263-1954-8.)

In Intimate Frontiers, Albert L. Hurtado tackles delicate, often obscured, subjects in a direct and scholarly manner. The result is an important contribution to our understanding of the history of human sexuality within the context of a multicultural society. While the final impact is disturbing, it is also provocative, leaving the reader with much to ponder about the relations between men and women within their own and across cultures in the American West. 1

In this slim book, Hurtado considers the ways that sexual behaviors and values illuminate power between men and women but also between competing cultural groups. He chooses California under its three different political systems—those of Spain, Mexico, and the United States—for his study. This is a California story far from the romantic haze of an earlier day in western history. In their individual cultures and in their overlapping experiences, the many Californians created a mighty crush of sexual dynamics that imposed emotional and physical hardships on the poorest and the weakest. . . .

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