Sex in the Heartland - Softcover

Beth Bailey is Foundation Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Kansas.

[A] vivid reminder of just how national and chaotic the events we call ‘the sixties’ really were... Bailey’s exploration of the sexual revolution offers a subtler sense of the underlying forces of that era, which unified even while dividing a nation and, ultimately, the world. (Tom Engelhardt The Nation)

[Beth Bailey’s] applied research here is interesting, imaginative and compassionate, and the final treat is that Bailey is a very good writer. Sex in the Heartland is simply a fascinating read. I’m sorry I can’t call her up and congratulate her on this book in person... [This book is] beautifully shaped, carefully thought out, a treasury of useful information. (Carolyn See Washington Post)

One of the great strengths of this book is Bailey’s ability to make local characters, institutions and fights vital and compelling, all the while keeping an eye on the broader issues at stake. She gives us a vivid portrait of one university town in transition and a case study for U.S. social history. A cast of local characters comes alive... Virtually every chapter has surprising, subtle turns in which Bailey’s thesis of historical paradox and unintended consequences is amply demonstrated. (Maureen McLane Chicago Tribune)

The book’s greatest strength is its delineation of ‘social and cultural changes’ as effected by watershed events (panty raids, the advent of the Pill, birth control clinics, co-ed dorms, coffee houses, and underground newspapers); [and] local and national institutions (which provided moral direction and financial and social support). (Jay A. Gertzman American Historical Review)

Bailey’s account of the sexual revolution in Lawrence, Kansas is a rejoinder to American critics on the right who continue to see this process as something imposed on ordinary people by bohemian intellectuals and sex radicals located on either coast, and not as a phenomenon integral to America’s ‘heartland.’ In Bailey’s account, the sexual revolution was a grassroots movement happening in any number of college towns across the USA, and created unwittingly by ‘people who had absolutely no intention of abetting a revolution in sex.’ Bailey argues that the replacement of moral with therapeutic frameworks for understanding sexual and emotional problems undermined any remaining moral consensus by offering non-punitive judgments on homosexuality and other forms of deviance. Unnoticed developments like the reform of parietals were far more important, in Bailey’s reading, than the pill or the counter culture... The fact that Bailey’s attention is directed towards the less renowned, everyday sources of sexual revolution makes this a valuable book. (H. G. Cocks Journal of Contemporary History)

Published by the prestigious Harvard University Press, the book suggests that out-of-the-mainstream states such as Kansas actually were on the cutting edge of the nation’s sexual revolution during the early 1960s. (Matt Moline Capital-Journal (Topeka, KS))

[Bailey] points out that those who claim the radical nature of the [sexual] revolution may be surprised by just how deep-seated and mainstream the origins of many of those revolutionary changes were. (Philip Godwin, M.D. Lawrence Journal-World)

Bailey examines the 20th-century ‘sexual revolution’ as it played out in the midwestern college town of Lawrence, Kansas... Bailey is especially perceptive on the ambivalent and conflicted relationship of both the feminist and gay rights movements to the sexual revolution. She also has strong sections on the birth control pill and other more mundane but long-lasting changes in American sexual culture... [A] fascinating and impressive book. (K. Blaser Choice)