Suchergebnisse

The biography of one of the most famous abortionists of the nineteenth century-and a story that has unmistakable parallels to the current war on reproductive rightsFor forty years in the mid-nineteenth century, Madame Restell, the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control medication, attended women during their pregnancies, delivered their children, and performed abortions in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. It was the abortions that made her famous. Restellism became the term her detractors used to indict her.Restell began practicing when abortion was largely unregulated in most of the United States, including New York. But as a sense of disquiet arose about single women flocking to the city for work, greater sexual freedoms, changing views of the roles of motherhood and childhood, and fewer children being born to white, married, middle-class women, Restell came to stand for everything that threatened the status quo. From 1829 onward, restrictions on abortion began to put Restell in legal jeopardy. For much of this period she prevailed-until she didn t.A story that is all too relevant to the current attempts to criminalize abortion in our own age, The Trials of Madame Restell paints an unforgettable picture of the changing society of nineteenth-century New York and brings Restell to the attention of a whole new generation of women whose fundamental rights are under siege

"An Open Secret traces the history of philanthropist Robert Allerton and his companion, John Wyatt Gregg, whom Allerton formally adopted as his son in 1960, after decades of living together. Yet why did these two men, who appear to be a gay couple from our view today, choose to project a father/son relationship? Syrett argues that in a period of both rising homosexual openness and social disapproval, the men had to find an alternative public logic for their situation. Whether or not Allerton and Gregg had sex with each other, they were undoubtedly a queer union: two high-society men who did not affirm traditional notions of partnership or couplehood"--

Most in the United States likely associate the concept of the child bride with the mores and practices of the distant past. But Nicholas L. Syrett challenges this assumption in his sweeping and sometimes shocking history of youthful marriage in America. Focusing on young women and girls--the most common underage spouses--Syrett tracks the marital history of American minors from the colonial period to the present, chronicling the debates and moral panics related to these unions. Although the frequency of child marriages has declined since the early twentieth century, Syrett reveals that the practice was historically far more widespread in the United States than is commonly thought. It also continues to this day: current estimates indicate that 9 percent of living American women were married before turning eighteen. By examining the legal and social forces that have worked to curtail early marriage in America--including the efforts of women's rights activists, advocates for children's rights, and social workers--Syrett sheds new light on the American public's perceptions of young people marrying and the ways that individuals and communities challenged the complex legalities and cultural norms brought to the fore when underage citizens, by choice or coercion, became husband and wife

This article explores how letters written by white men living in the Midwest reveal the relation between their location and their strategies to realize queer social and sexual lives from the 1930s through the 1950s. In particular I demonstrate how their relative isolation encouraged them to use correspondence for community formation and travel as a way to meet other men, emphasizing the circular nature of that travel (rather than one-way movement in classic accounts of queer migration). I also highlight the more fluid sexual identities of some of these men's sexual partners and explore the significance of the ethnic and political identities of the correspondents themselves. In sum, the article demonstrates how one group of queer men, themselves racially and politically representative of midwesterners at midcentury, forged queer lives for themselves in a region that has thus far seen little attention by scholars of the queer past.

Eighteen. Twenty-one. Sixty-five. In America today, we recognize these numbers as key transitions in our lives—precise moments when our rights and opportunities change—when we become eligible to cast a vote, buy a drink, or enroll in Medicare. This volume brings together scholars of childhood, adulthood, and old age to explore how and why particular ages have come to define the rights and obligations of American citizens. Since the founding of the nation, Americans have relied on chronological age to determine matters as diverse as who can marry, work, be enslaved, drive a car, or qualify for a pension. Contributors to this volume explore what meanings people in the past ascribed to specific ages and whether or not earlier Americans believed the same things about particular ages as we do. The means by which Americans imposed chronological boundaries upon the variable process of growing up and growing old offers a paradigmatic example of how people construct cultural meaning and social hierarchy from embodied experience. Further, chronological age always intersects with other socially constructed categories such as gender, race, and sexuality. Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, taking up a variety of distinct subcultures—from frontier children and antebellum slaves to twentieth-century Latinas—Age in America makes a powerful case that age has always been a key index of citizenship

In the decades after the Civil War, urbanization, industrialization, and immigration marked the start of the Gilded Age, a period of rapid economic growth but also social upheaval. Reformers responded to the social and economic chaos with a "search for order," as famously described by historian Robert Wiebe. Most reformers agreed that one of the nation's top priorities should be its children and youth, who, they believed, suffered more from the disorder plaguing the rapidly growing nation than any other group. Children and Youth during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era explores both nineteenth century conditions that led Progressives to their search for order and some of the solutions applied to children and youth in the context of that search. Edited by renowned scholar of children's history James Marten, the collection of eleven essays offers case studies relevant to educational reform, child labor laws, underage marriage, and recreation for children, among others. Including important primary documents produced by children themselves, the essays in this volume foreground the role that youth played in exerting agency over their own lives and in contesting the policies that sought to protect and control them

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction, or, Why Do the History of Heterosexuality? -- Part I: Difference and Desire since the Seventeenth Century -- 1. Toward a Cultural Poetics of Desire in a World before Heterosexuality -- 2. The Strange Career of Interracial Heterosexuality -- 3. Age Disparity, Marriage, and the Gendering of Heterosexuality -- 4. "Deviant Heterosexuality" and Model- Minority Families: Asian American History and Racialized Heteronormativity -- Part II: Difference, Bodies, and Popular Culture -- 5. Defining Sexes, Desire, and Heterosexuality in Colonial British America -- 6. Spectacles of Restraint: Race, Excess, and Heterosexuality in Early American Print Culture -- 7. Heterosexual Inversions: Satire, Parody, and Comedy in the 1950s and 1960s -- Part III: Embracing and Contesting Legitimacy -- 8. Holding the Line: Mexicans and Heterosexuality in the Nineteenth- Century West -- 9. Suburban Swing: Heterosexual Marriage and Spouse Swapping in the 1950s and 1960s -- 10. Race, Sexual Citizenship, and the Constitution of Nonmarital Motherhood -- Part IV: Discourses of Desire -- 11. Restoring "Virginal Conditions" and Reinstating the "Normal": Episiotomy in 1920 -- 12. How Heterosexuality Became Religious: Judeo- Christian Morality and the Remaking of Sex in Twentieth- Century America -- 13. The Price of Shame: Second- Wave Feminism and the Lewinsky- Clinton Scandal -- Acknowledgments -- About the Contributors -- Index