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Excerpt from Long Island Medical Journal, Vol. 2: January-December, 1908 A microscopical examination of the constituents of street dust Will usually reveal a mixture of the following sub stances. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Drawing on original research from medical texts, psychiatric case histories, pioneering statistical surveys, first-person accounts, legal cases, sensationalist journalism, and legislative debates, Jennifer Terry has written a nuanced and textured history of how the century-old obsession with homosexuality is deeply tied to changing American anxieties about social and sexual order in the modern age. Terry's overarching argument is compelling: that homosexuality served as a marker of the "abnormal" against which malleable, tenuous, and often contradictory concepts of the "normal" were defined. One of the few histories to take into consideration homosexuality in both women and men, Terry's work also stands out in its refusal to erase the agency of people classified as abnormal. She documents the myriad ways that gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities have coauthored, resisted, and transformed the most powerful and authoritative modern truths about sex. Proposing this history as a "useable past," An American Obsession is an indispensable contribution to the study of American cultural history.
Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Books for 2004The only book to cover the entire history of birth control and the intense controversies about reproduction rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years, The Moral Property of Women is a thoroughly updated and revised version of the award-winning historian Linda Gordon's classic history Woman's Body, Woman's Right, originally published in 1976.Arguing that reproduction control has always been central to women's status, The Moral Property of Women shows how opposition to it has long been part of the conservative opposition to gender equality. From its roots in folk medicine and in a campaign so broad it constituted a grassroots social movement at some points in history, to its legitimization through public policy, the widespread acceptance of birth control has involved a major reorientation of sexual values. Gordon puts today's reproduction control controversies--foreign aid for family planning, the abortion debates, teenage pregnancy and childbearing, stem-cell research--into historical perspective and shows how the campaign to legalize abortion is part of a 150-year-old struggle over reproductive rights, a struggle that has followed a circuitous path. Beginning with the "folk medicine" of birth control, Gordon discusses how the backlash against the first women's rights movement of the 1800s prohibited both abortion and contraception about 130 years ago. She traces the campaign for legal reproduction control from the 1870s to the present and argues that attitudes toward birth control have been inseparable from family values, especially standards about sexuality and gender equality. Highlighting both leaders and followers in the struggle, The Moral Property of Women chronicles the contributions of well-known reproduction control pioneers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Emma Goldman, as well as lesser- known campaigners including the utopian socialist Robert Dale Owen, the three doctors Foote--Edward Bliss Foote, Edward Bond Foote, and Mary Bond Foote--the civil libertarian Mary Ware Dennett, and the daring Jane project of the 1970s, in which Chicago women's liberation activists performed illegal abortions.
During the opening decades of the twentieth century, highly visible red-light districts occupied entire sections of many American cities. Prostitution, still euphemistically referred to as the "social evil," became one of the dominant social issues of the progressive era. Mark Thomas Connelly places the response to prostitution during those years within its complete social and cultural context. He shows how the antiprostitution movement became a focus for many of the anxieties and social tensions of the period. For many, prostitution seemed ominously linked to the changing status of women, the emergence of permissive sexual morals, uncontrolled immigration, the rampant spread of venereal disease, the decline of rural and small-town values, and urban political and moral corruption. Indeed prostitution became a symbol and code word for a host of unsettling issues and social changes. Connelly probes the complex relationship between prostitution and the other major social issues of the time. He shows that the response to prostitution was ambiguous. It was forward-looking in that it violated a traditional taboo by openly discussing an important aspect of sexual behavior, but it was also one of the last efforts to rebuttress traditional Victorian beliefs about the proper role and position of women in American society. Combining the techniques of social, cultural, and intellectual history, Connelly interprets every major aspect of his subject: the relationship between prostitution and the issue of independent, mobile women in the cities; the obsession with "clandestine" prostitution; the belief in a direct relationship between prostitution and immigration; the problem of venereal disease; the urban Vice Commission reports on the extent of commercialized sex in the cities; the "white slavery" issue and the belief that a conspiracy was afoot to debauch native American womanhood; and the concern about prostitution in connection with the last great issue of the progressive years, the mobilization for World War I. The Response ot Prostitution in the Progressive Era shows that great tension, anxiety, and doubt were important aspects of the profound reorientation in American society that gives the progressive era its distinctiveness as a historical period. Connelly reasserts their historical importance in this study of a major social and cutural episode in American history. Originally published in 1980. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
"... the papers in Deviant Bodies reveal an ongoing Western preoccupation with the sources of identity and human character." -- Times Literary Supplement "Highly recommended for cultural studies... " -- The Reader's Review "It would be useful for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in the sociology of the body, the history and sociology of science and medicine, and women's studies courses, particularly those exploring the feminist critiques of science and medicine." -- Contemporary Sociology "... a powerful deconstruction of the scientific gaze in configuring bodily deviance as a means of legitimating the social order within multiple historical and social contexts.... the many excellent selections will make for compelling reading for students of medical anthropology and the history of science." American Anthropologist Deviant Bodies reveals that the "normal," "healthy" body is a fiction of science. Modern life sciences, medicine, and the popular perceptions they create have not merely observed and reported, they have constructed bodies: the homosexual body, the HIV-infected body, the infertile body, the deaf body, the colonized body, and the criminal body.
