Americans in the last half of the twentieth century often felt as if they had become suddenly inundated with an obsessive fascination with gender and sexuality. The most commonly evoked cause—the movement for equal rights for women that emerged out of the 1960s ferment (known to historians as feminism’s second wave)—has propelled fundamental alterations in women’s legal and personal status in many areas of the world. Yet, the very name—the “second wave”—suggests that what appears to be a “modern” issue carries significantly deeper roots.

When we discuss gender, we mean the assumptions made about and the social roles occupied by individuals with specific physical characteristics that we denote as “male” and “female.” Although we tend to assume two sexes (male and female) as “natural,” scholars have pointed out that other societies have had different ideas. Some believed that there was only one physical body (for example, that women were men turned inside out); other societies believed that there were three or even more sexes. The particular social assumption about how many sexes even exist is often more a reflection of gender beliefs than any empirical knowledge. For example, the fact that a small, but significant, number of infants are born every year with the physical characteristics of both a male and a female (known as “intersexed” in medical terminology) has only recently received extended public discussion. Many individuals argue that they are transgendered— belonging to neither “official” category of current gender identification. Since such basic gender identifications can be so fluid, it is not surprising that gendered ideas about what people should wear or the work they should do are also subject to dramatic change over time. In America, there have been ongoing historical struggles over the roles men and women should occupy—particularly in the public arena—since the country’s inception. The most famous battle—the movement for women’s right to vote—began officially in 1848 and took over seventy years of continuous activity until passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. Dramatic changes in gender relations did accelerate in response to the Industrial Revolution. As more people moved into urban environments and as factory employment needs increased, it became less clear who was “supposed” to work in what locales and who was not. Simultaneously the rules for public activity proved less enforceable. Who was really there to tell the factory-shop girl she should not venture out to an evening’s entertainment? In a relatively short time, rigid assumptions about “acceptable” behavior for both men and women began to collapse under the pressure of real-life circumstances. By the 1920s, following feminism’s “First Wave,” American women both had the vote and had received more PhDs than they would for another sixty years. As the last fact reveals, gender assumptions are often the playthings of economic developments. Despite significant advances early in the twentieth century much progress for women seemed to disappear in the face of the economic and political crises of the 1930s and 1940s. More traditional notions of gender roles reasserted themselves despite evidence of very real needs and possibilities to the contrary.

The growing dichotomy between supposed gender roles and actual gender behavior helped fuel the gender controversies in the last fifty years. The very fact that women successfully staffed defense-industry plants in large numbers during the Second World War—despite being told they were biologically unfit for such activity and fired once the war concluded—helped pave the way for important subsequent gender re-evaluation. While imagery in the 1950s presented a simple domestic life in which women stayed home, in fact women constituted the fastest-growing group entering the labor market during this period. White women working in the 1950s proved essential to creating the highly prized growing middle class. As the economy of the 1950s and 1960s expanded, career doors opened. Women refused to be limited by simple prejudice about “appropriate” work, and the movement for access to all employment categories gathered steam. It is this ongoing insistence that has vexed so many in the last quarter century. If gender assumptions are often shaped by economic circumstances, in America they are also determined by racial ideologies. Claims about proper “women’s” work often applied only to certain white women. Those arguing against women working outside the home rarely worried that a significant proportion of African American women always did just that. Indeed, without the highly circumscribed categories of domestic and menial labor enforced upon African Americans, both male and female, it is unlikely that so many white Americans could have so successfully entered that desirable middle class in the postSecond World War era.

While gender questions are often assumed to be “only” about women, the nature of masculinity also changed profoundly in the same period. In an age of increasing bureaucratization and technology physical strength and aggression—often hallmarks of behavior marked as “male”—became more liabilities than assets. Men have also had to adapt to women’s refusal to limit their activities to home and child rearing. Although the most apparent “beneficiaries” of the gender struggles are women, men have also been changed almost as dramatically.

If shifts in gender roles and even in gender itself have hardly occurred quietly debates over sexuality have raged even more loudly The topics of gender and sexuality are natural cousins because they often impact on each other. This linkage is nothing new.

Those studying sexuality in the late nineteenth century—a group of scientists known as sexologists—believed that they could determine “deviant” sexual practices based upon observed “improper” gender behavior. Thus, a quiet man who liked to cook was probably a homosexual; a woman with short hair who liked sports most likely a lesbian. As these examples indicate, stereotypes about sexuality remain even more obstinate over 100 years than do those about gender.

All societies have engaged in a wide variety of sexual practices. All societies have depicted or written about sexuality Americans are no different in this regard. The seemingly accelerated pace of public sexual controversy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is a reflection of particular historical trends—some specific to the American context, some more reflective of broader changes.

The Industrial Revolution impacted sexual practice with the same force that it disrupted gender relations (and everything else). A stunning decline in average childbirth rates from eight children per family in 1800 to approximately three in 1900 trumpets the fact that heterosexuals made informed reproductive choices. On the farm, children were unpaid essential laborers. In the new post-industrial world order they became economic liabilities—mouths to be fed and impediments to capital accumulation. Men and women chose not to have children. They did not choose to stop having sex. In these raw demographic numbers lie the roots for much of what we call “modern sexuality.” Men and women needed to discuss their decision; they needed to negotiate; they needed to have access to contraceptive devices. Ultimately what they needed most was to find another way to understand and talk about the now primarily non-reproductive sexual practices they enjoyed with each other.

They did so in an increasingly urban environment that provided expanded anonymity and freedom from social restraints. The effects of modernization itself with developing leisure cultures, visual technologies, mass media and increasing mobility contributed to an expanded universe of sexual possibility and public presentation. All this was set in place in America by the 1920s. People wrote sex manuals for married couples; millions of dollars poured into sex education in the schools; Freud’s ideas became enormously popular and homosexual subcultures flourished in numerous cities around the country.

The very controversies that would so inflame the second half of the century appeared well underway during the first. As the twentieth century closed however, debates over both the proper place of sexuality and what sexuality is occupied the thoughts of many. Although the roots of these issues are apparent earlier, the claims made by the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s that women owned their own bodies and held the sole rights to reproductive authority produced the fundamental conflict within the heterosexual community. The development of the pill in 1960 provided strong medical support for women’s position. Completely divorced from reproduction, sexuality now demanded its own vocabulary The early twentiethcentury debates over female sexual satisfaction escalated into endless public discussions over how best to achieve sexual pleasure. Most importantly the battle for reproductive autonomy was truly joined with the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion. This highly contested ruling formed the basis for years of struggle at whose core sat the question of women’s sexual choices.

The women’s movement set into motion a series of questions about sex, the answers to which seemed to call for greater sexual possibilities. Gays and lesbians, men and women who had already begun struggling for social acceptance in the 1950s, expanded that call into a demand for gay liberation in the 1970s and 1980s. The debate over homosexuality has been as ferocious as the argument over abortion. As homosexual-rights activists press their claims for equal rights and full acceptance with greater success, those opposed grow increasingly insistent and point to what they argue is a general decline in moral values. They look to the increased presence of children born to those not married, the large number of heterosexuals who choose to live together without marrying and the widespread popularity of sexual themes in popular culture as examples of unacceptable sexual chaos. The Defense of Marriage Act, passed by Congress in 1996, which prohibited the federal government from legally recognizing a “homosexual marriage” (should a state permit such a union), reinforced the perception of many that heterosexual marriage—perhaps heterosexuality itself—had become and institution in jeopardy at the end of the twentieth century.

From the emergence of sexually explicit magazines in the 1950s and 1960s, like Playboy and Penthouse, which catered to private male sexual fantasy to the late twentieth-century expansion of pornography into the sexually integrated home through video, cable and the Internet, millions of Americans have responded eagerly to the much decried sexual culture. This continued discrepancy between values proclaimed and activities practiced has animated significant public discussion and numerous scholarly debates. Propelled also in large part by the women’s movement, scholars began to look at the history of sexuality and gender roles in society. French philosopher Michel Foucault provided the central impetus with his influential introduction to the History of Sexuality, Volume I, published initially in 1976. Foucault outlined the socially constructed nature of sexuality (a point long illustrated by anthropologists) and laid out key analytic techniques for those who might follow. Many did. Among the numerous texts produced by this next generation of scholars, several of the most important include: Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, Sherry Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (eds) (1981); Gender and the Politics of History, Joan Scott (1988); Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kesofsky Sedgewick (1990); and Gender Trouble by Judith Butler (1996). Theoretically challenging, late twentieth-century scholars provided new methods and languages for discussing gender. Although some critics claimed that such work remained isolated in an “ivory tower,” the development of this innovative scholarship clearly reflected the fact that the very real, day-to-day world of gender relations and sexuality surrounding everyone has been fundamentally transformed.

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