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| Additional Physical Format: | Online version: Bullough, Vern L. Science in the bedroom. New York : BasicBooks, c1994 (OCoLC)624183322 |
|---|---|
| Document Type: | Book |
| All Authors / Contributors: |
Vern L Bullough |
| ISBN: | 0465030203 9780465030200 |
| OCLC Number: | 29600852 |
| Description: | 376 p. ; 25 cm. |
| Contents: | Sex research and assumptions: from the Greeks to the nineteenth century -- Homosexuality and other factors in brining about sex research -- Hirschfeld, Ellis, and Freud -- The American experience -- Endocrinology research and changing attitudes -- From Freud to biology to Kinsey -- From statistics to sexology -- The matter of gender: masculinity, femininity, and cross-gender behavior -- Other voices, other views -- Probles of an emerging science. |
| Responsibility: | Vern L. Bullough. |
Abstract:
From the first serious sex research study ever undertaken (in France with a group of Prostitutes in 1830) to the work of Masters and Johnson in our own day, sex research has been a field mired in controversy. Science in the Bedroom shows how, for most of its history and in whatever country it has been undertaken, sex research has been driven by forces outside itself. Among those forces have been groups marginalized as deviant, including homosexuals, free-love advocates, and feminists; courts and governments in search of independent data to support public morality standards; the desires of women for safe and effective contraceptive devices freely disseminated; the desire of doctors to medicalize all sex research and to view only the research that produces treatment therapies as valuable; and the fears of public funding institutes that their images will be sullied if they support independent sex research. The book traces how this moral overtone led the Rockefeller family to support sex research and how their money led to basic scientific breakthroughs in the l92Os and 1930s, culminating in the Kinsey studies. The backlash was so great, however, that the Rockefeller foundation dropped its sex studies. Based on archival sources and extensive personal interviews, Science in the Bedroom celebrates the lives and work of the major figures who risked their academic reputations to work in a stigmatized field. Vern L. Bullough emphasizes the difficulty of researching sex, since it involves not only biology but psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, and a variety of professions, including medicine, religion, law, nursing, and social work. Containing fascinating new material on the efforts of a group of turn-of-the-century German homosexuals to decriminalize homosexuality, and on such important but largely forgotten female sex researchers as Katherine Bement Davis and Clelia Mosher, the book credits courageous homosexuals and feminists for much of the best early work.
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