Twentieth-century Sexuality

This book provides a fascinating history of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe and North America. Angus McLaren draws upon legal, medical and literary sources to demonstrate how modern sexuality has been shaped by race, class, gender and generational preoccupations. He explores why the century was punctuated by sexual panics over a range of issues from abortion, contraception and marital disharmony to frigidity, homosexuality and AIDS. By scrutinizing the activities of sexologists, psychoanalysts, eugenicists, feminists and fascists - as well as the ordinary men and women they sought to influence - this book tracks the shifting meanings the western world has given to sexuality.