In the Trenches of the Sexual Revolution

Beth Bailey. Sex in the Heartland. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 320 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.00.

You don't know real trepidation until you sit down to read a history of the sexual revolution that seems likely to star your own senior colleagues. Beth Bailey's Sex in the Heartland examines the post-World War II struggle over sexual rules and behavior in the "heartland" of Lawrence, Kansas, a classic mid-sized college town built around the University of Kansas. Bailey's focus on Lawrence not only allows her to add greater depth and nuance to the traditional narrative of the sexual revolution, but also supports one of her central contentions that university communities played a crucial role in fostering the rise of a more "liberated" sexual culture. Could "free love" in the faculty lounge be far behind?

Despite the prominence of the University of Kansas and some of its faculty and administrators in Bailey's story, Sex in the Heartland ends up being not so much a Lingua Franca exposé writ large as a serious examination---perhaps our first serious examination---of the ways in which ordinary Americans outside the urban centers of culture struggled through the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Historians of the sexual revolution seem to have their own stations of the cross: Hef and Marcuse, the Fanny Hill case and other challenges to the laws against obscenity, the "Summer of Love" in 1967, the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the radical feminist communities in New York and California, and then Plato's Retreat, the 1970s "swingers' palace" that seemed in Truman Capote's breathless reportage the logical culmination of the "revolution."

Bailey duly bends her knee at most of these stations, but then follows a separate path. First, she breaks the sexual revolution down into its separate components. The system of middle-class morality that was dominant up to the 1960s might have been fairly monolithic, but opponents of this system were only occasionally in agreement with one another, sometimes at odds, and sometimes weren't even aware that they were, together, helping to erode the markers for middle-class respectability. Bailey therefore divides her subject into separate chapters on such topics as parietals, oral contraception, and gay rights; each of these movements had its own motivations and its own internal dynamics, and historians have done violence to these differences by attempting to force all of the challenges into the single mold of revolution.

Bailey's second innovation is her focus on the ways in which these challenges developed in a single community. Thus, Sex in the Heartland follows some of the best recent work in the history of sexuality--in particular, George Chauncey's Gay New York (1994) and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis's Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (1993) in moving away from Foucaultian speculation and histories of "discourse" and toward situating sexual meanings and behaviors in specific historical locations.

The focus on Lawrence is significant not because the town itself was so important, but precisely because it was remote from the epicenters of sexual radicalism: "If the challenges to America's sexual codes had taken place only in the streets of Greenwich Village and the Haight-Ashbury," Bailey writes, "there would have been no revolution" (pp. 3-4). Only when the language of opposition had become commonplace, unremarkable coming from the mouth even of a Kansas farmboy, could the changes in attitude and morality be called revolutionary. Bailey's emphasis on Lawrence also requires a different model of social change. Large-scale social changes don't simply filter down from the metropoles, but proceed from multiple centers throughout the country, each participant conscious of the other, and each affecting the other in different ways--Bailey's metaphor for social transformation seems to be the Internet rather than broadcast television.

From this new perspective, the sexual revolution no longer seems to be...