A01=Kara French
African American Shakers
American communal societies
anti-Catholicism in the United States
anti-Shaker activism
asexuality
Author_Kara French
Baltimore
Boston
Category=JBFW
Category=JBSF
Category=NHK
Catholic
Catholic priests
Catholic sisters
Catholic women religious
celibacy
chastity
communitarianism
convents
Cornelia Connelly
Emmittsburg
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
families of choice
KY
Lebanon
MA
MD
Mount Lebanon
nineteenth-century American Catholicism
nineteenth-century American middle class
nineteenth-century Catholic education
nineteenth-century culture industry
nineteenth-century reform movements
nineteenth-century tourism
nineteenth-century utopian societies
nuns
NY
Oblate Sisters of Providence
OH
queer families
religious sacrifice
sexual abstinence
sexual reformers
Shaker religion
Shakers
Sisters of Charity
Sisters of Charity of Nazareth
Sylvester Graham
vegetarianism
Product details
- ISBN 9781469662138
- Weight: 515g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 07 Jun 2021
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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How much sex should a person have? With whom? What do we make of people who choose not to have sex at all? As present as these questions are today, they were subjects of intense debate in the early American republic. In this richly textured history, Kara French investigates ideas about, and practices of, sexual restraint to better understand the sexual dimensions of American identity in the antebellum United States. French considers three groups of Americans-Shakers, Catholic priests and nuns, and followers of sexual reformer Sylvester Graham-whose sexual abstinence provoked almost as much social, moral, and political concern as the idea of sexual excess. Examining private diaries and letters, visual culture and material artifacts, and a range of published works, French reveals how people practicing sexual restraint became objects of fascination, ridicule, and even violence in nineteenth-century American culture.
Against Sex makes clear that in assessing the history of sexuality, an expansive view of sexual practice that includes abstinence and restraint can shed important new light on histories of society, culture, and politics.
Against Sex makes clear that in assessing the history of sexuality, an expansive view of sexual practice that includes abstinence and restraint can shed important new light on histories of society, culture, and politics.
Kara French is associate professor of history at Salisbury University.
