Why am I passionate about this?

When I finished my second book, which followed the life course of women in the U.S. in the early 20th century, I was left with questions and some confusion about women’s sexuality in the period. Books and magazine articles at the time obsessively discussed young women and their sexual freedom. But young women’s journals, and the psychological literature showed that publicly, young women performed a heterosexual script, but privately, and emotionally, they often remained far more comfortable with other girls and young women. Slowly it became clear that the real sexual revolution of the 20th century was the triumph of heterosexual relations and norms during the 1920s until the 1940s. 


I wrote

Youth and Sexuality in the Twentieth-Century United States

By John C. Spurlock,

Book cover of Youth and Sexuality in the Twentieth-Century United States

What is my book about?

When did the sexual revolution happen? Most Americans would probably say the 1960s. In reality, young couples were changing the…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945

John C. Spurlock Why did I love this book?

Clement explores the working class environment that produced what we think of as “normal” relations between young men and women.

The commonly used term at the time, “treating,” has disappeared. But in the early 20th century this practice, which shared some features with prostitution, turned a search for fun, gendered scripts, and wage discrepancies between men and women into the general model of what would become the classic practice of dating.

By Elizabeth Alice Clement,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Love for Sale as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The intense urbanization and industrialization of America's largest city from the turn of the twentieth century to World War II was accompanied by profound shifts in sexual morality, sexual practices, and gender roles. Comparing prostitution and courtship with a new working-class practice of heterosexual barter called ""treating"", Elizabeth Alice Clement examines changes in sexual morality and sexual and economic practices. Women ""treated"" when they exchanged sexual favors for dinner and an evening's entertainment or, more tangibly, for stockings, shoes, and other material goods. These ""charity girls"" created for themselves a moral space between prostitution and courtship that preserved both sexual…


Book cover of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America

John C. Spurlock Why did I love this book?

While we can hardly think about couples today without the idea of dating, the practice was new and very edgy in the early 20th century.

Beth Bailey shows how the classic “dating and rating” complex emerged and became not just accepted but expected among middle-class couples. She also takes us through the transition to the “going steady” complex later in the century.

By Beth L. Bailey,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked From Front Porch to Back Seat as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"Whether or not we've come a long way since then, this engaging study of courtship shows that at least half the fun is in reading about getting there."--'St. Louis Post-Dispatch.'


Book cover of Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties

John C. Spurlock Why did I love this book?

This is a tour de force on the lives of girls and young women in the era of World War II and the 1950s.

Littauer makes use of non-traditional sources to show how young women negotiated a sexual landscape that was rapidly changing and which gave them more choices and often more control over their sexuality.

During the war years, young women found that the rapid mobilization and unsettled conditions near military bases gave them opportunities for sexual adventures that settle times would never allow.

And during the post-war, within the “going steady” practices of the time, women could become sexually active with some protection from social stigma.

By Amanda H. Littauer,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Bad Girls as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier. From World War II-era "victory girls" to teen lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s, these nonconforming women and girls navigated and resisted intense social and interpersonal pressures to fit existing mores, using the upheavals of the era to pursue new sexual freedoms.…


Book cover of Coming Of Age In New Jersey: College and American Culture

John C. Spurlock Why did I love this book?

Michael Moffatt was a professor of anthropology when he embedded himself in the Rutgers student dorms to begin a years-long investigation of what entering adulthood meant for undergraduates at the State University of New Jersey.

Moffatt’s research included survey data, perceptive description of his own experience, and student journals (used with permission, of course). In the great tradition of social science, Moffatt identifies a range of sexual types among the young people he studied. 

By Michael Moffatt,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Coming Of Age In New Jersey as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Coming of Age is about college as students really know it and-often-love it. To write this remarkable account, Michael Moffatt did what anthropologists usually do in more distant cultures: he lived among the natives. His findings are sometimes disturbing, potentially controversial, but somehow very believable. Coming of Age is a vivid slice of life of what Moffatt saw and heard in the dorms of a typical state university, Rutgers, in the 1980s. It is full of student voices: naive and worldy-wise, vulgar and polite, cynical, humorous, and sometimes even idealistic. But it is also about American culture more generally: individualism,…


Book cover of American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus

John C. Spurlock Why did I love this book?

Changes in sexuality during the 20th century have provoked popular panics in American society.

The most recent swirls around hook-up culture, a version of undergraduate social play popular since the late 1990s. Lisa Wade does a masterful job of unpacking the meanings of hook-up culture and the ways it has shaped undergraduate sexuality at many American universities. 

By Lisa Wade,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked American Hookup as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The hookup is now part of college life. Yet the drunken encounter we always hear about tells only a fraction of the story. Lisa Wade offers the definitive account of this new sexual culture and demonstrates that the truth is both more heartening and disturbing than we thought. Offering invaluable insights for parents, educators and students, Wade situates hookup culture within the history of sexuality, the evolution of higher education and the unfinished feminist revolution. Using new research, she maps out a challenging emotional landscape marked by unequal pleasures, competition for status and sexual violence. Accessible and open-minded, compassionate and…


Explore my book 😀

Youth and Sexuality in the Twentieth-Century United States

By John C. Spurlock,

Book cover of Youth and Sexuality in the Twentieth-Century United States

What is my book about?

When did the sexual revolution happen? Most Americans would probably say the 1960s. In reality, young couples were changing the rules of public and private life for decades before. By the early years of the twentieth century, teenagers were increasingly free of adult supervision, and taking control of their sexuality in many ways. Dating, going steady, necking, petting, and cohabiting all provoked adult hand-wringing and advice, most of it ignored. By the time the media began announcing the arrival of a ‘sexual revolution,’ it had been going on for half a century.

Book cover of Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945
Book cover of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America
Book cover of Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties

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Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS

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Book cover of Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS

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Amy Carney Author Of Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS

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Why am I passionate about this?

Author Historian Professor Curl up with a good book reader Traveler – Berlin is my happy place!

Amy's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What is my book about?

When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more on topic, but it would be more accurate to say that I wrote a book about SS men as husbands and fathers.

From 1931 to 1945, leaders of the SS, a paramilitary group under the Nazi party, sought to transform their organization into a racially-elite family community that would serve…

Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS

By Amy Carney,

What is this book about?

From 1931 to 1945, leaders of the SS, a paramilitary group under the Nazi party, sought to transform their organization into a racially-elite family community that would serve as the Third Reich's new aristocracy. They utilized the science of eugenics to convince SS men to marry suitable wives and have many children.

Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS by Amy Carney is the first work to significantly assess the role of SS men as husbands and fathers during the Third Reich. The family community, and the place of men in this community, started with one simple order issued by…


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