Sex in the Heartland Book

For Beth Bailey, the sexual revolution was not one, but many. Its fundamental processes were not particular to the nation's cosmopolitan enclaves. Its challenges to America's sexual codes were not imposed on the nation by fringe radicals. "It was forged in America's heartland as well, shaped not only by committed revolutionaries but by people who had absolutely no intention of abetting a revolution in sex. Adding the heartland to our stories of the sexual revolution changes its meaning: this revolution was thoroughly of America" (p. 3).

What state is more thoroughly of America than Kansas? And Lawrence, home to the University of Kansas, is where Bailey's heartland battles of the sexual revolution were most widely engaged and most visible to the rest of the state. Yet, the social/cultural historian does not intend this localized study to be representative of America's experience. Her multi-layered narrative based on a diverse set of local and national sources, including periodicals, government and university records, personal interviews and archives, instead argues that Lawrence's revolution is specific to itself, as were the revolutions across America. And by turning "to the experiences of one Midwestern university town embedded in an increasingly potent national culture, we can learn much about the social and cultural changes we call the sexual revolution" (p. 5).

The first half of Bailey's work focuses on strands that led to the revolution, which begin in the wake of World War II. Lawrence saw its population almost double to nearly 24,000 during the decade before 1950. Residents were more economically and racially diverse. The G.I. Bill and a new focus on universal high school education also meant they were becoming more educated. According to Bailey, these fundamental processes, along with a new national consumer culture, undermined the authority of local elites to dictate the terms of public norms and the private acts of local sexual culture. At KU, administrators' authority was also undermined by new therapeutic methods for disciplining misconduct. Behaviors considered deviant, including homosexuality, were no longer an issue of morality to be punished, but of mental illness to be treated by a psychiatrist. Different procedures for handling sexual misconduct made the rules seem arbitrary, including continued expulsion for premarital intercourse and parietals governing when women could leave their residence halls. Arguments over the parietals became an issue in the fall of 1965. Although students understood it as a debate about the sexual freedom of women, they instead pushed the discussion to the role of the individual in the world. Their arguments echoed curricular reforms stressing the development of responsibility and maturity, so administrators could not ignore or refute their logic. Mandatory curfews were ultimately eliminated for juniors and seniors. "Responsibility' had paved the way for 'Freedom.' Widely accepted beliefs in American society - in this case, the need to produce mature youth, capable of sustaining democracy in the Cold War world - inadvertently paved the way for a sexual revolution" (p. 104).

Another accepted belief that made its way to Lawrence was that The Pill could alleviate poverty through population control. In 1963, Kansas legislators made it legal for public institutions to offer the oral contraceptive and two years later, local programs received federal funding. University Health Services refused to dispense to unmarried women. The County Health Department did not require examinations, as did a local Planned Parent affiliate, and therefore remained the cheapest and least complicated place to obtain The Pill. In 1971, it served 8,529 patients (Lawrence's 1970 population was just under 46,000) and dispensed or prescribed almost 38,000 months of pills with a single physician, Dr. Dale Clinton. A year later, KU's February Sisters began to demand full health care for women students. They argued that control of reproductive functions is a fundamental right, rejecting the frameworks of sexual morality and population control that had governed access to contraceptives. A year later, Dr. Clinton resigned under pressure to provide health exams with prescriptions, but he had "facilitated the sexual revolution in Lawrence and changed the lives of thousands of young women and their partners" (p. 135).

In the second half of Bailey's work we finally meet the actors who made purposeful claims and committed radical acts. First are the rebels who attempted to define their community by shocking and offending outsiders, generally through the local underground press. Vortex and The Screw made full use of their right to publish words like "fuck" and "cunt." The pages are littered with images as ridiculous as naked people on toilets in a meadow and as offensive as a woman "spread-eagled on the ground, performing fellatio on one 'pig' while another uses his finger…" (p. 171). Bailey explains that these words and images seemed to many to be powerful weapons in the struggle against a repressive culture. Next is the Lawrence Gay Liberation Front, which worked to consolidate local gay culture and community. While KU never officially recognized the campus-based organization, and the Supreme Court refused to hear its appeal, administrators quietly accorded them greater privileges, including an office in the student union and free access to space for meetings and dances. The local women's liberation movement also managed to compel Lawrence's police, courts and medical personnel to see rape not as a relatively understandable act of sexual passion often provoked by its victims, but as a crime of violence. Even though the two groups might have been bound by the shared term "liberation," members of both were not very comfortable and even hostile with each other. "In a very real way, however, they did compose a coherent, though complex, strand in the sexual revolution…In seeking liberation, they meant to change the world and to remake the place of sex in it" (p. 199).

Perhaps the biggest heroes in Bailey's localized version of the sexual revolution were not radical at all. A 1967 "Morality Survey" on campus showed that 91 percent of freshman and seniors thought premarital sex morally unacceptable. A year later KU began to institute an open visitation policy allowing men and women free access to each other's rooms. Administrators expressed confidence in the maturity and responsibility of students while asserting that open visitation would make life more normal and thus hospitable to both intellectual and personal growth. Two years later, when surveyed about a proposal for a fourth coed dorm, most students expressed beliefs that men and women had much to share as people and that coed living could provide a system of gender equality in which both would share responsibilities, truly talk with one another and break down the restrictive roles that impeded true intimacy. "The earnest voices of these young people, calling for relationships based on friendship and equality and centered in the individuals' common humanity, tend to get lost in the cacophony, submerged in the spectacle offered by 'Free Love.' But this strand lies at the heart of it all" (p. 215).

After reading Bailey's assessment of Lawrence, I'm not entirely convinced that the young people who rebelled against a coherent set of sexual norms, a coherent sexual culture weren't instead actors in a process of evolution. Based on Susan K. Cahn's later work, Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age, one could effectively argue that evolution began as early as the 1920s, with another youth culture struggling to define itself outside of established and oppressive norms. As for the legacy of Bailey's revolution, she concedes that those who made purposeful claims and committed radical acts - in Lawrence or otherwise - did not destroy the beliefs central to prerevolutionary public opinion. Large numbers of Americans continue to believe that sex is immoral outside of marriage and that homosexuality is a sin. However, "because of the sexual revolution, these beliefs and values are contested. They do not mark the boundaries of public discourse: they are proclaimed by one set of voices among many" (p. 216).