Love for Sale

By Elizabeth Alice Clement,

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

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Love for Sale as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

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.

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Book cover of Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption

Who Is a Worthy Mother? By Rebecca Wellington,

I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…

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