Gillian Frank On Christmas Eve 1955, Jacqueline Smith died from an illegal abortion at her boyfriend Thomas G. Daniel’s apartment. Jacqueline Smith was born in Lebanon, Pennsylvania in 1935. A quiet, driven and talented artist, she graduated from high school in 1953 and moved to New York City where she […]
Tag: 20th Century US History
“The Gay Revolution”: An Interview with Lillian Faderman
Interview by Lauren Gutterman Lillian Faderman’s The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (Simon & Schuster, 2015) provides a moving and far-reaching account of the LGBT movement in the United States, from the founding of the homophile movement in the 1950s, to recent struggles for an Employment Non-Discrimination Act […]
“This is Your Pasty”: The Performance of Queer Domesticity in Small-Town Wisconsin
Two queer men elevated the simple pasty to a luxurious, gourmet meal.
Out in the Open: Rural Life, Respectability, and the Nudist Park
Brian Hoffman In the early 1930s, after attending a showing of This Nude World at the Castle Theater in Chicago, Alois Knapp and his wife Lorena decided to convert their 200-acre farm located in Roselawn, Indiana into a nudist camp. Although they had never dreamed that they would go into […]
Red War on the Family: An Interview with Erica Ryan
Interview by Christina Simmons Erica Ryan’s Red War on the Family (Temple 2014) argues that the first Red Scare–the backlash against and anxiety about domestic and foreign radicals–and its organizational progeny not only deeply shaped the American political world of the 1920s but also fundamentally affected ideas and practices of sexuality […]
Too Little, Too Late: The Path To Griswold v. Connecticut
It had taken fifty years to defeat the repressive, prudish and sexist ban on birth control.
Heterosexuality and Americanization: "Social Education" for Immigrant Youth in the 1920s
Erica Ryan In the nativist 1920s, in the wake of successive waves of mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, progressives in the United States engaged in tremendous efforts to assimilate immigrants into their vision of American culture. For these white, middle-class, and Protestant reformers, channeling sexuality into marriage was key […]
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