front cover of West of Sex
West of Sex
Making Mexican America, 1900-1930
Pablo Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Sex can be an oppressive force, a tool to shame, divide, and control a population. But it can also be a force for change, for the legal and physical challenge of inequity and injustice. In West of Sex, Pablo Mitchell uses court transcripts and criminal cases to provide the first coherent picture of Mexican-American sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century, and a truly revelatory look at sexual identity in the borderlands.

As Mexicans faced a rising tide of racial intolerance in the American West, some found cracks in the legal system that enabled them to assert their rights as full citizens, despite institutional hostility. In these chapters, Mitchell offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of ethnicity and power in the United States, placing ordinary Mexican women and men at the center of the story of American sex, colonialism, and belonging.

Other chapters discuss topics like prostitution, same-sex intimacy, sexual violence, interracial romance, and marriage with an impressive level of detail and complexity. Written in vivid and accessible prose, West of Sex offers readers a new vision of sex and race in American history.

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What Adolescents Ought to Know
Sexual Health Texts in Early Twentieth-Century America
Jennifer Burek Pierce
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011

In 1901, Dr. Alfred Fournier committed an act both simple and revolutionary: he wrote ForOur Sons, When They Turn 18, a sexual and reproductive health treatise based on his clinical work at a leading Paris hospital. If this booklet aided adolescent understanding of health, it also encouraged reformers around the world to publish. By 1913, countless works on venereal disease prevention were available to adolescents.

During this period, authors wrestled with how to make still-developing scientific information available to a reader also in the process of maturing. What would convince a young person to avoid acting on desire? What norms should be employed in these arguments, when social and legal precedents warned against committing ideas about sex to print? How, in other words, could information about sex be made both decent and compelling? Health reformers struggled with these challenges as doctors' ability to diagnose diseases such as syphilis outpaced the production of medicines that could restore health. In this context, information represented the best and truest prophylactic. When publications were successful, from the perspective of information dissemination, they were translated and distributed worldwide.

What Adolescents Ought to Know explores the evolution of these printed materials—from a single tract, written by a medical researcher and given free to anyone, to a thriving commercial enterprise. It tells the story of how sex education moved from private conversation to purchased text in early twentieth-century America.

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What Soldiers Do
Sex and the American GI in World War II France
Mary Louise Roberts
University of Chicago Press, 2013
How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways.

That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty. 

While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.
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front cover of When Children Want Children
When Children Want Children
THE URBAN CRISIS OF TEENAGE CHILDBEARING
Leon Dash
University of Illinois Press, 2003
 
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former Washington Post reporter Leon Dash spent a year living in one of the poorest ghettos in Washington, D.C., and a total of seventeen months conducting interviews examining the causes and effects of the ever-lowering age of teenage parents among poor black youths.
Dash had expected to find inadequate sex education and lack of birth control to be the root cause of the growing trend toward early motherhood, but his conversations with the mothers themselves revealed the truth to be more complex.
A riveting account of the human stories behind the statistics, When Children Want Children allows readers to hear the voices of young adults struggling with poverty and parenthood and gets to the heart of teenage parents’ cultural values and motivations.
 
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front cover of Women and Health in America, 2nd Ed.
Women and Health in America, 2nd Ed.
Historical Readings
Judith W. Leavitt
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999
In this thoroughly updated second edition, Judith Walzer Leavitt, a leading authority on the history of women's health issues, has collected thirty-five articles representing important scholarship in this once-neglected field. Timely and fascinating, this volume is organized chronologically and then by topic, covering studies of women and health in the colonial and revolutionary periods and the nineteenth century through the Civil War. The remainder of the book concentrates on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and addresses such controversial issues as body image and physical fitness, sexuality, fertility, abortion and birth control, childbirth and motherhood, mental illness, women's health care providers (midwives, nurses, physicians), and health reform and public health.
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