| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports. By Miriam G. Reumann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 305pp.).
Miriam Reumann's American Sexual Character is a welcome addition the history of sexuality. Like many recent books on the history of sexuality, American Sexual Character examines discourse rather than behavior. While many such books look at a rather broad period to get at changes in beliefs, this volume restricts the scope of its analysis to a roughly fifteen year period from the end of World War Two until 1960. In doing so, Reumman focuses intently on how the post-war world viewed men, woman, sexual normativity, and sexual deviants.	1
Rather than exploring the Kinsey Reports as the title implies, Reumann uses the Kinsey Reports as a starting point to assess debates about sexuality in the post-war world. She argues that America, battered first by WWII and then the Cold War, experienced the Kinsey Report as a document that pin-pointed a current crisis in society. In locating the crisis, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (the first volume published) forced the nation to reassess sexuality—its meanings, its incidence, and its importance. She argues that the Kinsey Reports (both male and female) mattered to American because sexuality had become fundamental to national identity and national character.	. . .

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