ABSTRACT
“Sexual revolution” evokes images of sexual freedom, of sexuality released from societal expectations and sex acts as expressions of liberation; moments when sex is at the heart of social change with explicitly political intent. When radical feminists centered their analysis of women’s oppression in the myth of the vaginal orgasm, which represented woman’s sexual subordination to man, their critique identified the centerpiece of women’s oppression in gendered sexualities first erected in the era immediately following the American Revolution. This sexual revolution took as its target the modern sexual system, wherein one’s sexual nature was understood to be an outgrowth of binary genders of male and female rooted in the physiology of the body, and wherein racialized sexualities were promoted as evidence of the existence and embodiment of race. Marriage authorized sexual relations and granted a husband exclusive access to his wife’s body; all children born of her body were her husband’s, unless adultery was proved.
