| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America. By Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. (New York: Knopf, 2002. viii, 514 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-375-40192-X.)
Among the adjectives habitually attached to the word Victorian are prudery, hypocrisy, and sexual repression. In fact, the nineteenth century was fascinated by sex. It saw the first systematic studies of prostitution and venereal disease, a new understanding of the reproductive organs and nervous system, and new labels to describe human sexual behavior. It also witnessed expanded commerce in erotica, self-conscious efforts to limit births, and extended government power to regulate obscenity, prostitution, and sodomy.	1
Rereading Sex, which focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on New York, is a fascinating reinterpretation of nineteenth-century sexual attitudes. Rejecting the notion of a monolithic Victorian culture in which a conspiracy of silence surrounded public discussion of sex, it identifies four frameworks through which Americans understood and debated sexuality. These include an earthy vernacular sexual culture, an evangelical Protestantism distrustful of the flesh, health reformers eager to disseminate accurate information about sexual functioning, including birth control, and free-thinkers and utopian socialists, from Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright to Ezra Heywood and Victoria Woodhull, who advocated sexual fulfillment, not necessarily within the bonds of marriage.	. . .

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