How Sex Became a Civil Liberty

How Sex Became a Civil Liberty

Author: Leigh Ann Wheeler

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-12-01

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0199987084

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How Sex Became a Civil Liberty is the first book to show how and why we have come to see sexual expression, sexual practice, and sexual privacy as fundamental rights. Using rich archival sources and oral interviews, historian Leigh Ann Wheeler shows how the private lives of women and men in the American Civil Liberties Union shaped their understanding of sexual rights as they built the constitutional foundation for the twentieth-century's sexual revolutions. Wheeler introduces readers to a number of fascinating figures, including ACLU founders Crystal Eastman and Roger Baldwin; nudists, victims of involuntary sterilization, and others who appealed to the organization for help; as well as attorneys like Dorothy Kenyon, Harriet Pilpel, and Melvin Wulf, who pushed the ACLU to tackle such controversial issues as abortion and homosexuality. It demonstrates how their work with the American Birth Control League, Planned Parenthood Federation, Kinsey Institute, Playboy magazine, and other organizations influenced the ACLU's agenda. Wheeler explores the ACLU's prominent role in nearly every major court decision related to sexuality while examining how the ACLU also promoted its agenda through grassroots activism, political action, and public education. She shows how the ACLU helped to collapse distinctions between public and private in ways that privileged access to sexual expression over protection from it. Thanks largely to the organization's work, abortion and birth control are legal, coerced sterilization is rare, sexually explicit material is readily available, and gay rights are becoming a reality. But this book does not simply applaud the creation of a sex-saturated culture and the arming of citizens with sexual rights; it shows how hard-won rights for some often impinged upon freedoms held dear by others.


How Sex Became a Civil Liberty

How Sex Became a Civil Liberty

Author: Leigh Ann Wheeler

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0190206527

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How Sex Became a Civil Liberty shows how we came to see sexual expression, sexual practice, and sexual privacy as fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution, thanks to the work of ACLU leaders and attorneys who forged legal principles that advanced the sexual revolution.


The Man Who Hated Women

The Man Who Hated Women

Author: Amy Sohn

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1250174821

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Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Best History Books of 2021 • "Fascinating . . . Purity is in the mind of the beholder, but beware the man who vows to protect yours.” —Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker Anthony Comstock, special agent to the U.S. Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. His eponymous law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with long sentences and steep fines. The word Comstockery came to connote repression and prudery. Between 1873 and Comstock’s death in 1915, eight remarkable women were charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws. These “sex radicals” supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and women’s right to pleasure. They took on the fearsome censor in explicit, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, marriage, and love for a bold new era. In The Man Who Hated Women, Amy Sohn tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and in the press. They were publishers, writers, and doctors, and they included the first woman presidential candidate, Victoria C. Woodhull; the virgin sexologist Ida C. Craddock; and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In their willingness to oppose a monomaniac who viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family, the sex radicals paved the way for second-wave feminism. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined birth control access as a civil liberty. The Man Who Hated Women brings these women’s stories to vivid life, recounting their personal and romantic travails alongside their political battles. Without them, there would be no Pill, no Planned Parenthood, no Roe v. Wade. This is the forgotten history of the women who waged war to control their bodies.


Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century

Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century

Author: Geoffrey R. Stone

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2017-03-21

Total Pages: 935

ISBN-13: 1631493655

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A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection A “volume of lasting significance” that illuminates how the clash between sex and religion has defined our nation’s history (Lee C. Bollinger, president, Columbia University). Lauded for “bringing a bracing and much-needed dose of reality about the Founders’ views of sexuality” (New York Review of Books), Geoffrey R. Stone’s Sex and the Constitution traces the evolution of legal and moral codes that have legislated sexual behavior from America’s earliest days to today’s fractious political climate. This “fascinating and maddening” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) narrative shows how agitators, moralists, and, especially, the justices of the Supreme Court have navigated issues as divisive as abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and contraception. Overturning a raft of contemporary shibboleths, Stone reveals that at the time the Constitution was adopted there were no laws against obscenity or abortion before the midpoint of pregnancy. A pageant of historical characters, including Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Anthony Comstock, Margaret Sanger, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, enliven this “commanding synthesis of scholarship” (Publishers Weekly) that dramatically reveals how our laws about sex, religion, and morality reflect the cultural schisms that have cleaved our nation from its founding.


Harvard Law Review: Volume 127, Number 1 - November 2013

Harvard Law Review: Volume 127, Number 1 - November 2013

Author: Harvard Law Review

Publisher: Quid Pro Books

Published: 2013-11-10

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 1610278887

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The November issue is the special annual review of the U.S. Supreme Court's previous Term. Each year, the issue is introduced by noteworthy and extensive contributions from recognized scholars. In this issue, for the 2012 Term, articles and essays include: • Foreword: "Equality Divided," by Reva B. Siegel • Comment: "Beyond the Discrimination Model on Voting," by Samuel Issacharoff • Comment: "Windsor and Brown: Marriage Equality and Racial Equality," by Michael J. Klarman • Comment: "License, Registration, Cheek Swab: DNA Testing and the Divided Court," by Erin Murphy The issue also features essays on substantive and procedural law, and judicial method, honoring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her 20 years on the Court. The essays are written by such scholars as Deborah Anker, Susan Farbstein, Judge Nancy Gertner, Lani Guinier, Vicki Jackson, Richard Lazarus, John Manning, Martha Minow, Carol Steiker, Julie Suk, Laurence Tribe, and Mark Tushnet. In addition, the first issue of each new volume provides an extensive summary of the important cases of the previous Supreme Court docket, covering a wide range of legal, political and constitutional subjects. Student commentary on Leading Cases of the 2012 Term includes recent cases on: federal preemption regarding elections; the Privileges and Immunities Clause; unconstitutional conditions violating free speech; effective assistance of counsel; dog-sniffing at the doorstep under the Fourth Amendment; jury trial right for mandatory sentencing; affirmative action in public universities; class action certification in securities cases; class action waivers in arbitration clauses; plain error review when new law is made after appeal; standing in government surveillance challenges; extraterritoriality under the Alien Tort Statute; actual innocence under AEDPA; deference to agencies in clean water and communication act cases; the First Sale Doctrine in copyright law; patent exhaustion; patentable subject matter; reverse payment settlements; Indian adoptions; and employer liability for supervisor harassment under Title VII. Complete statistical graphs and tables of the Court's actions and results during the Term are included. Finally, the issue features several summaries of Recent Publications.


Beyond Abortion

Beyond Abortion

Author: Mary Ziegler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-02-23

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 0674976703

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Roe's privacy rationale inspired left-leaning movements unrelated to abortion--around sexual orientation, class, gender, race, disability, and patient rights. But groups on the right used it as well, to attack government involvement in American life. Mary Ziegler's analysis shows that privacy belongs to no party or cause.


The Injustices of Rape

The Injustices of Rape

Author: Catherine O. Jacquet

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-09-17

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1469653877

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From 1950 to 1980, activists in the black freedom and women's liberation movements mounted significant campaigns in response to the injustices of rape. These activists challenged the dominant legal and social discourses of the day and redefined the political agenda on sexual violence for over three decades. How activists framed sexual violence--as either racial injustice, gender injustice, or both--was based in their respective frameworks of oppression. The dominant discourse of the black freedom movement constructed rape primarily as the product of racism and white supremacy, whereas the dominant discourse of women's liberation constructed rape as the result of sexism and male supremacy. In The Injustices of Rape, Catherine O. Jacquet is the first to examine these two movement responses together, explaining when and why they were in conflict, when and why they converged, and how activists both upheld and challenged them. Throughout, she uses the history of antirape activism to reveal the difficulty of challenging deeply ingrained racist and sexist ideologies, the unevenness of reform, and the necessity of an intersectional analysis to combat social injustice.


Vagrant Nation

Vagrant Nation

Author: Risa Goluboff

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-01-25

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0190262273

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In 1950s America, it was remarkably easy for police to arrest almost anyone for almost any reason. The criminal justice system-and especially the age-old law of vagrancy-served not only to maintain safety and order but also to enforce conventional standards of morality and propriety. A person could be arrested for sporting a beard, making a speech, or working too little. Yet by the end of the 1960s, vagrancy laws were discredited and American society was fundamentally transformed. What happened? In Vagrant Nation, Risa Goluboff answers that question by showing how constitutional challenges to vagrancy laws shaped the multiple movements that made "the 1960s." Vagrancy laws were so broad and flexible that they made it possible for the police to arrest anyone out of place: Beats and hippies; Communists and Vietnam War protestors; racial minorities and civil rights activists; gays, single women, and prostitutes. As hundreds of these "vagrants" and their lawyers challenged vagrancy laws in court, the laws became a flashpoint for debates about radically different visions of order and freedom. Goluboff's compelling account of those challenges rewrites the history of the civil rights, peace, gay rights, welfare rights, sexual, and cultural revolutions. As Goluboff links the human stories of those arrested to the great controversies of the time, she makes coherent an era that often seems chaotic. She also powerfully demonstrates how ordinary people, with the help of lawyers and judges, can change the meaning of the Constitution. The Supreme Court's 1972 decision declaring vagrancy laws unconstitutional continues to shape conflicts between police power and constitutional rights, including clashes over stop-and-frisk, homelessness, sexual freedom, and public protests. Since the downfall of vagrancy law, battles over what, if anything, should replace it, like battles over the legacy of the sixties transformations themselves, are far from over.


How Rights Went Wrong

How Rights Went Wrong

Author: Jamal Greene

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1328518116

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An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.