Hatheway, Jay. The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ix + 232 pp. Introduction, notes, bibliography and index. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-312-23492-9.

Passet, E. Joanne. Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. ix + 259 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography and index. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-252-02804-X.

     "This book has a large ambition—to reorient our thinking about the American middle class" (xi). So begins Robert Johnston's study of petit-bourgeois radicalism in Portland circa 1900 to 1920, and by any measure The Radical Middle Class is indeed a tour de force. Its twenty-two chapters—liberally sprinkled with maps and illustrations and backed up by a statistical appendix and eighty pages of notes—synthesize labor, business, medical, intellectual, and political history. On page after page, Johnston serves up arresting stories about middle-class activism in Portland, provocative extrapolations about the larger political history of the American middle class, and fresh analyses of middle-class mobilizations on a broad range of issues, from protective labor law to tax policies to compulsory vaccination.

     The idea that nineteenth-century Americans were prudes has been a favorite historical punching bag. Ellen Rothman, Karen Lystra, Peter Gay, and Carl Degler have shown that the "Victorians" (white, native-born, Protestant, middle-class Americans) were not cold, disembodied, and sexless. The death blow to depictions of the Victorians as utterly repressed was dealt by those who, following Foucault, reject the idea that suppression and silence were the mechanisms regulating sexuality; production and multiplication of knowledge, not repression, is the way power works. Far from being repressed, Victorians were obsessed with sex. The revolt against the notion of Victorian prudery has been so successful that scholars like Steven Seidman have felt the need to remind historians that though nineteenth-century Americans may not have been tight-lipped know-nothings, neither were they frolicsome bon vivants, chatting pleasantly about the joys of sex.