Make Love, Not War

The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History

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by David Allyn

Routledge

Due/Published April 2001, 400 pages, paper

ISBN 0415929423

New in paper (S01) (Little Brown published it in cloth)

Make Love, Not War is a serious treatment of the complicated events, ideas, and personalities that drove forward the sexual revolution of the 1960s in America. Based on first-hand accounts, diaries, interviews, and period research, it traces changes in private lives and public discourse from the fearful fifties to the first tremors of rebellion in the early sixties to the heyday of the "revolution."

This history tells the stories of the major figures of the period--sexual freedom fighters, feminists, scientists, pornographers, gay activists, First Amendment lawyers, and others who made the headlines. But it is based equally on the testimony of ordinary people: men and women who dared to take risks in their private lives and share their experiences with others. They wanted a freer, more open society and their stories of spouse swapping, swinging, group sex, and other erotic adventures reveal an era in which "the pursuit of happiness" took on new meaning in American life. Allyn argues that the sexual revolutionaries of the '60s and '70s, by telling the truth about their own histories and desires, forced all Americans to re-examine the very meaning of freedom.

Contents

Introduction
Single Girls, Double Standard
Beatniks and Bathing Suits
The Pill: A Prescription for Equality
Love the One You're With
Obscenity on Trial
Strangers in a Strange Land: The Harrad Experiment and Group Marriage
The Right to Marry: Loving v. Virginia
In Loco Parentis
Strange Bedfellows: Christian Clergy and the Sexual Revolution
Performing the Revolution
Sticky Fingers
Gay Liberation
The Golden Age of Sexual Science
Medicine and Morality
Why Do These Words Sound So Nasty?
(Id)eology: Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, and Fritz Perls
No Privacy Please: Group Sex in the Seventies
The Joy of Sales: The Commercialization of Sexual Freedom
Lesbian Liberation: Equal But Separate
Sexual Freedom on Demand
Counterrevolution and Crisis
Epilogue
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index