This book is, ostensibly, about the history of transsexuality in the US. But it is, as its title implies, more generally about how the concept of "sex" itself has changed in the US in the past hundred years. Meyerowitz has done an amazing job of putting together activist, scientific, and popular cultural sources to produce a scholarly -- but very readable -- history. Meyerowitz's main point is that it is through a "taxonomic revolution" -- initiated by the possibilities of transsexuality -- that scientists, sexual minorities, and broader US society have come to distinguish between sex, gender, and sexuality, and the kinds of identities that are attached to these concepts. She argues most persuasively that the distinction between these arenas of lived experience were worked out through the debates over transsexuality in the US, drawing on earlier European sexological discourses.

Meyerowitz uses Christine Jorgensen as the central figure in this book, and has gone part of the way to producing something of a biography of CJ. This works really well. Another notable feature of this book is that Meyerowitz is careful to follow the different experiences of transexual men and women, which adds further depth to this book.

This book is very readable -- I intend to teach it in an undergraduate course this year -- while at the same time theoretically sound and clearly very well-researched. It answered many questions that I had, and brought together much of what I have wanted to understand about this field.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in gender and sexuality, both specialists and the general reader.

This is a great compliation of essays about women during the 1950s who did not fit the idealized "feminine mystique" of the housewife. Joanne Meyerowitz's essay responding to Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" is particularly interesting and reavealing. Meyerowitz conducted thourough research and came to the conclusion that the media, while celebrating domesticity, simultaniously applauded women who acheived in politics, careers, volunteer work and other areas outside the home. The book includes sections on Chinese American women and their arrival after the second world war, the brutal murder of Emmett Till, women labor activists, nurses, and education. It is comprehensive and highly historical, but easy and interesting for non-reasearchers to read.

Like many gen-x progressives, I had absorbed the popular portrayal of the 'feminine mystique' without realizing there were still progressives fighting the good fight in post-war America. Not until working on a graduate level independent study did I realize how easily the mass media had distorted and hidden a facinating history of feminism and progressivism--at a time supposedly anthetical to both.

Without diminishing the hardships that did exist (restrictions on abortion, contraceptives, pregnancy discrimination, racial discrimination, homophobic bar raids) she shows how these groups responsed with ingenuity and independence. As an added plus, the book confirms dissent was much larger than the mass media or public officials cared to actually admit back to the general public. This false reassurance temporarily fit into the cold-war's emphasis on bland conformity, but it silenced many people's experiences until now.

Progressive actions must have been impossible in the era of McCarthyism's suppression of political and cultural dissent, but perseverance made the women's victories all the more rewarding. Furthermore, many of the same women profiled in Meyerowitz's book used the time to lay critical groundwork essential for the 'revolutionary' 1960's and 1970's. Feminism did not simply reconstitute itself after an 'abscence' following suffrage victory, but was marginalized by an unspoken arrangement between the media and politics.

Buy two copies of this book. One for yourself---and one to give your least favirote far right politican a much needed wakeup call.