"There's Something Happening Here": The Sexual Revolution in Lawrence, Kansas

Sex in the Heartland. By Beth Bailey. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. 265 pages. $27.00 (cloth).

LOOSELY TOSSED AROUND BY POLITICIANS, DISCREDITED IN THE PUBLIC IMAGINATION, and flat-out violated by advertisers, the entire concept of "revolution" seems to be in crisis. Whereas the desire for revolution was evident in the 1960s in countless ways, most activists from this period look back upon the overblown rhetoric of the new left and counterculture with, at best, an impish sense of chagrin. "Be Realistic--Demand the Impossible," a world-wide rallying cry for young militants in 1968, today carries all of the sound and fury of a bumper sticker on an ailing Volkswagen.

How very felicitous, then, is Beth Bailey's new book Sex in the Heartland--a lucid and complex look at the cultural and sexual politics that took shape in Lawrence, Kansas from World War II until the early 1970s. Although Bailey admits that the seismic changes in American sexual attitudes during this period can only be described as "revolutionary," she also believes that scholars who have tried to locate these changes in the upheavals, convulsions, and cataclysms of the "Radical Sixties" have been led astray. However real the "sexual revolution" may have been, Bailey argues that this is an inadequate way of describing the remaking of gender relations in the second half of the twentieth century, which actually came about in a tentative, halting fashion, often as a result of unintended consequences and with origins in mainstream sources.

Thankfully, no one who reads this book is likely to accept the murky historical vision of many of today's conservatives, who hold that a cabal of feminist extremists and free love radicals somehow sprung to life in the 1960s and single-handedly whipped the nation into a sexual frenzy from which it has yet to recover. But even as Bailey demonstrates that the sexual revolution unfolded gradually and in unexpected ways, her long-range perspective still slights the quantum leaps in American sexual codes that were spurred on by the youth revolt of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I

In an effort to highlight the mainstream origins of the sexual revolution, Bailey grounds her story in the hinterland of Lawrence, Kansas--"the ultimate provincial place, the ultimate not-New York." ¹ Home to the University of Kansas (KU), Lawrence clearly experienced the sexual revolution differently than most other Kansas towns; it would be a mistake, however, to suggest that Lawrence was in any way shut off from the "geography, population, politics, economy, and culture" of Kansas or, for that matter, the rest of the Midwest (5). By examining the sexual revolution as it happened in (literally) the center of the country, Bailey makes a welcome contribution to a body of literature that has too often dwelled upon the happenings in New York, California, and a handful of cosmopolitan enclaves in between.

Sex in the Heartland begins with the onset of World War II because it was then that many autonomous, local communities began to forge tighter connections with a burgeoning national culture. The expansion of federal authority, the G.I. Bill, the speedy construction of interstate highways, the unsettling of smaller towns, and nascent trends toward the inclusion of people from different backgrounds into the American mainstream may not have had anything to do with sex, but they all helped to lay the groundwork for subsequent challenges to established sexual norms.

In the aftermath of the war, Lawrence's leaders saw their oversight of the community's social order steadily diminished as the town grew larger and more affluent, and as the community became more closely linked to an increasingly sexualized consumer culture. Meanwhile, campus life underwent drastic changes. As colleges and universities matriculated more students during the 1950s than ever before, administrators came to rely upon the expertise and people-handling skills of military-trained...