Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982 (review)

Second-wave feminism has gotten a bad rap recently. In the 1990s, with the advent of poststructuralist feminism and queer theory in the academy and the more widely publicized if not widely embraced "postfeminism" of Naomi Wolf, Katie Roiphe, et al., North American academics and activists alike rewrote second-wave feminism as old-fashioned, essentialist, and/or antisex. This revision followed important and timely critiques by feminists of color in the 1980s (in such works as the ground-breaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back) that pointed out the assumptions of whiteness made by many second-wave feminists. ¹ Yet despite its critical blind spots, second-wave feminism contributed a great deal to current understandings of gender and sexuality and has formed, in conjunction with other social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a foundation for much of the activist and intellectual work that has followed it. Jane Gerhard's book reminds us of some of second-wave feminism's successes and limits as well as its place in the genealogy of contemporary studies of sexuality.

Part of Gerhard's project in Desiring Revolution is recuperative: to read sex and sexuality back into the second wave. In her introduction, Gerhard insists on the importance of correcting a common historical misreading: "I certainly want to fight the crazy notion that feminists are antisex. Such a construction is breathtakingly wrong" (11). But this project is more than a corrective; it is also a commentary on current histories of the study of sexuality in North America. While queer theory and lesbian and gay studies can all too often disassociate their objects of study and theoretical origins from feminist scholarship and activism, Gerhard reminds us that feminists have been incorporating sexuality into their work since the 1970s (and before). She is one of a handful of scholars currently revisiting the 1970s and their critical legacies, including Linda Garber and Gayle Rubin, among others. ² In a 1994 interview with Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin refused to accept a genealogy of LGBT studies and queer theory that erases the work on sexuality performed during the 1970s: "There now seems to be a certain amnesia about early work of lesbian and gay studies, as if the field only just started in the early or mid 1980s. This just isn't true. There are whole strata of work in lesbian and gay scholarship which date from the early 1970s and which came out of the gay liberation movement. These in turn built on even earlier research based in the homophile movement. . . . [Gay and lesbian studies] was a thriving scholarly enterprise long before it began to be institutionalized" (89). ³ Not only does Desiring Revolution remind us of the erotic practices of second-wave feminists, but also, like Rubin, Gerhard asserts the critical importance of their theoretical work. She puts sexuality back into feminism, and she puts second-wave feminist theory back into a critical genealogy of studies of sexuality.

Gerhard organizes her inquiry into sexuality and feminism by mapping a productive tension between "expert" and "feminist" constructions of female orgasm and sexual pleasure. This focus on the constructions of sexual pleasure necessarily limits and omits some of the critical elements of feminism and studies of sexuality in the period (1920-82) and nation (the United States) that she studies. In her introduction, she explicitly warns the reader of the limited scope of her inquiry: "There are many stories to tell about radical feminism. But the one I tell in Desiring Revolution is a history of how predominantly white middle-class radical feminists came to see sexuality as the primary source of both women's oppression and their liberation" (3). Within these parameters, she succeeds in writing a compelling narrative of changing...