Make Love, Not War
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Overview
Make Love, Not War is the first full-scale history of how the Sexual Revolution changed life in America forever. A fascinating and frank portrait of private lives and public discourse, it traces changes from the deceptively repressive Fifties, to the first tremors of rebellion in the early Sixties and the sexual rights movement of the mid Sixties, to the heady heyday of the Revolution (1969-73), and the counterrevolution in the early Seventies.
Synopsis
Drawing on first-hand accounts, diaries, interviews, and period research, historian Allyn traces the course of the events, ideas, and personalities that drove the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Among the figures are sexual freedom fighters, feminists, scientists, pornographers, gay activists, and First Amendment lawyers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
New York Times Book Review
...provides a useful and readable narrative uncontaminated by heavy postmodern conceptual folderol...Allyn fascinatingly integrates hitherto unconnected figures such as the patrician Estelle Griswold, who struggled through ever higher courts to legalize Planned Parenthood in Connecticut, and the 23-year-old Jefferson Poland, who founded the League of Sexual Freedom and had a national impact on the development of the hippie, free speech and nudist movements...Allyn...instructs us in the potent forces that have become the contemporary basis of such extraordinary surprises in human sexuality.
Editorials
Chicago Tribune
...a useful and readable chronicle of this melange of activity and talk that changed American culture irreversibly...Out Magazine
...offers marvelous reminders of how zany homophobia was in its glory days...US Weekly
...offers a very readable and intelligent analysis of an often oversimplified era...New York Times Book Review
...provides a useful and readable narrative uncontaminated by heavy postmodern conceptual folderol...Allyn fascinatingly integrates hitherto unconnected figures such as the patrician Estelle Griswold, who struggled through ever higher courts to legalize Planned Parenthood in Connecticut, and the 23-year-old Jefferson Poland, who founded the League of Sexual Freedom and had a national impact on the development of the hippie, free speech and nudist movements...Allyn...instructs us in the potent forces that have become the contemporary basis of such extraordinary surprises in human sexuality.Publishers Weekly -
Successfully treading the fine line between a serious chronicle and sensationalism in his account of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s in the U.S., Princeton historian Allyn mixes a smooth narrative of events (e.g., the legalization of birth control, abortion and interracial marriage), the famous (Hugh Hefner, Masters and Johnson) and not so famous (Jeff Poland of the Sexual Freedom League), with occasional analytic excursions into dramatic changes in society and individual lives. The book ranges widely, from Helen Gurley Brown's packaging of sexual liberalism in Sex and the Single Girl to novels promoting sexual utopias (i.e., The Harrad Experiment), the decline of the college policy of in loco parentis, the uses of sexual liberation by suburban swingers and political radicals like the Weathermen, and the commercialization of sex. Based on interviews with participants in these activities (including such figures as Barney Rosset, Rita Mae Brown and Andrea Dworkin, as well as ordinary people), and materials from the period, Allyn ascribes full credit to feminism and gay liberation for social changes that touched almost all Americans. Readers who lived through these heady events will appreciate his fresh perspective, while those of his generation (he was born in 1969) may be amazed to learn, for example, that birth control was illegal in many states as late as 1965. Allyn's broad sweep occasionally gives short shrift to historical background in areas like birth control or obscenity in literature. And he falters badly in his final chapter, virtually ignoring the feminist defense of sexual freedom and putting too much emphasis on the coalition of antipornography feminists and the religious right in his recounting of the decline of sexual liberation. Overall, though, Allyn's work is as exuberant and expansive as the movement he observes. 8 pages of photos not seen by PW. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|Lionel Tiger
To my knowledge, no other book gathers together this array of material . . . A useful and readable narrative uncontaminated by heavy postmodern conceptual folderol. . . . [Allyn] is neither an erotic partisan nor a scold.—The New York Times Book Review