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Title: How Sex Became a Civil Liberty

Author: Leigh Ann Wheeler

Narrator: Melissa Reizian

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins

Language: English

Release date: 12-17-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 4 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

How Sex Became a Civil Liberty is the first book to show how and why we have come to see sexual expression, sexual practice, and sexual privacy as fundamental rights. Using rich archival sources and oral interviews, historian Leigh Ann Wheeler shows how the private lives of women and men in the American Civil Liberties Union shaped their understanding of sexual rights as they built the constitutional foundation for the twentieth-century's sexual revolutions. Wheeler introduces listeners to a number of fascinating figures, including ACLU founders Crystal Eastman and Roger Baldwin; nudists, victims of involuntary sterilization, and others who appealed to the organization for help; as well as attorneys like Dorothy Kenyon, Harriet Pilpel, and Melvin Wulf, who pushed the ACLU to tackle such controversial issues as abortion and homosexuality. It demonstrates how their work with the American Birth Control League, Planned Parenthood Federation, Kinsey Institute, Playboy magazine, and other organizations influenced the ACLU's agenda.

Wheeler explores the ACLU's prominent role in nearly every major court decision related to sexuality while examining how the ACLU also promoted its agenda through grassroots activism, political action, and public education. She shows how the ACLU helped to collapse distinctions between public and private in ways that privileged access to sexual expression over protection from it. Thanks largely to the organization's work, abortion and birth control are legal, coerced sterilization is rare, sexually explicit material is readily available, and gay rights are becoming a reality. But this book does not simply applaud the creation of a sex-saturated culture and the arming of citizens with sexual rights; it shows how hard-won rights for some often impinged upon freedoms held dear by others.

Members Reviews:

A very Well Wriitten, Informative Book on the amazing evolution of Sexual Civil Liberties in the U.S

I found this book to be a wonderful and detailed review of an important cultural and legal revolution that has taken place in this country. There are a number of people, including me, that were amazed at the speed with which the law and the culture of this country have changed concerning sexual civil liberties. This book gives a very clear explanation of the legal underpinnings of those changes--and the fascinating characters that moved this along. I recommend it highly.

Cool read

A very informative look at how the sex revolution brought about the reasoning that sex and one's sexual preference is a protected right.

Knowing History is Important! And regarding sexual civil liberties....essential

this book is amazing. The author does a comprehensive review of the emergence of sexual civil liberty movement in the US...much work remains to be done, obviously. This is a great book.