Prescription for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era
In this lively and engaging work, Carolyn Lewis explores how medical practitioners, especially family physicians, situated themselves as the guardians of Americans' sexual well-being during the early years of the Cold War. She argues that many doctors viewed their patients' sexual habits as more than an issue of personal health. They believed that a satisfying sexual relationship between heterosexual couples with very specific attributes and boundaries was the foundation of a successful marriage, a fundamental source of happiness in the American family, and a crucial building block of a secure nation.

Drawing on hundreds of articles and editorials in medical journals as well as other popular and professional literature, Lewis traces how medical professionals defined and reinforced heterosexuality in the mid-twentieth century, giving certain heterosexual desires and acts a veritable stamp of approval while labeling others as unhealthy or deviant. Lewis links their prescriptive treatment to Cold War anxieties about sexual norms, gender roles, and national security. Doctors of the time, Lewis argues, believed that "unhealthy" sexual acts, from same-sex desires to female-dominant acts, could cause personal and marital disaster; in short, says Lewis, they were "un-American."
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Prescription for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era
In this lively and engaging work, Carolyn Lewis explores how medical practitioners, especially family physicians, situated themselves as the guardians of Americans' sexual well-being during the early years of the Cold War. She argues that many doctors viewed their patients' sexual habits as more than an issue of personal health. They believed that a satisfying sexual relationship between heterosexual couples with very specific attributes and boundaries was the foundation of a successful marriage, a fundamental source of happiness in the American family, and a crucial building block of a secure nation.

Drawing on hundreds of articles and editorials in medical journals as well as other popular and professional literature, Lewis traces how medical professionals defined and reinforced heterosexuality in the mid-twentieth century, giving certain heterosexual desires and acts a veritable stamp of approval while labeling others as unhealthy or deviant. Lewis links their prescriptive treatment to Cold War anxieties about sexual norms, gender roles, and national security. Doctors of the time, Lewis argues, believed that "unhealthy" sexual acts, from same-sex desires to female-dominant acts, could cause personal and marital disaster; in short, says Lewis, they were "un-American."
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Prescription for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era

Prescription for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era

by Carolyn Herbst Lewis
Prescription for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era
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Prescription for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era

Prescription for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era

by Carolyn Herbst Lewis

Overview

In this lively and engaging work, Carolyn Lewis explores how medical practitioners, especially family physicians, situated themselves as the guardians of Americans' sexual well-being during the early years of the Cold War. She argues that many doctors viewed their patients' sexual habits as more than an issue of personal health. They believed that a satisfying sexual relationship between heterosexual couples with very specific attributes and boundaries was the foundation of a successful marriage, a fundamental source of happiness in the American family, and a crucial building block of a secure nation.

Drawing on hundreds of articles and editorials in medical journals as well as other popular and professional literature, Lewis traces how medical professionals defined and reinforced heterosexuality in the mid-twentieth century, giving certain heterosexual desires and acts a veritable stamp of approval while labeling others as unhealthy or deviant. Lewis links their prescriptive treatment to Cold War anxieties about sexual norms, gender roles, and national security. Doctors of the time, Lewis argues, believed that "unhealthy" sexual acts, from same-sex desires to female-dominant acts, could cause personal and marital disaster; in short, says Lewis, they were "un-American."

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807899540
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 10/18/2010
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 240
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Carolyn Herbst Lewis is assistant professor of history at Grinnell College.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Delving into issues rarely examined by historians, Carolyn Lewis argues that physicians helped construct the criteria by which healthy heterosexuality was defined and understood in the Cold War era. She brings a keen analytic eye to this fascinating, well-written, and illuminating study.—Elaine Tyler May, author of America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation

This engaging and well-researched history explores how physicians' advice underwrote postwar gender prescriptions and helped to shape new norms of sex and marriage for Americans. By examining both medical debates and patient norms, Lewis illuminates the interlocking worlds of physicians and those who sought their counsel in an era of experts.—Miriam Reumann, author of American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports

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