Author Description

Seven original essays document the radical shifts in attitudes during the half century, drawing on material ranging from legal battles to popular science. Among the topics are the displacement of the spiritual and asexual mother promulgated by feminists with the defiantly sexual mother envisioned by eugenists, custody suits that reveal gaps between ideologies of motherhood, prose narratives and films dramatizing anxiety about the subject, sex-education manuals on controlling the sexual knowledge of children, and the threat of a new sexual morality during the First World War. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR