Fans pick 100 books like Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style

Written while August Bebel was serving a jail term under Germany’s anti-socialist laws, Woman and Socialism was published in over fifty editions and in more than twenty languages between 1879 and 1914. The first English edition was published in 1908 and became something of a sensation in the United Kingdom and the United States. Unlike other men in the labor movement at the time, Bebel believed that women were the full equals of men and should have the same economic, social, and political rights. More importantly, he argued that socialism would give women economic independence, and that this would allow them more freedom in their personal lives, including in their choice of a sexual partner. The book sometimes feels as radical today as it was 150 years ago.

Engels provides the canonical theoretical framework for understanding how capitalism uniquely impacts women’s lives and how a more collectivized economy lays the foundation for women’s full emancipation. While many subsequent feminist and socialist scholars have disagreed with this book, The Origin of the Family is a classic that has inspired countless generations of theorists and activists. 

This deeply researched book explores the massive upheavals that followed the Bolshevik Revolution in the young Soviet Union. By mining a rich body of archival research, Goldman reveals just how radical Soviet policies to emancipate women really were in their historical context. More importantly, she uncovers the heated debates that characterized this early period of Soviet history before the rigidity and paranoia of Stalinism takes over and he reverses many of the early gains.

This is another book that drew me in with the title. I appreciated how McLellan fought the stereotype, advanced by some of her academic peers, of sexual repressiveness in East Germany. Though public discussions of sexuality were tightly controlled by the state, McLellan deftly shows that East Germany experienced a sexual revolution of its own.

Maybe not a revolution as loud and proud as in the West, challenging gender norms and sexual identities, but divorce rates soared as did birth rates outside marriage, nudism became a state-sanctioned activity, and erotica became increasingly available to the public and found in private collections.

McLellan’s narrative is fascinating, illuminating, and at times humorous, drawing on interviews, magazine publications, heterosexual and queer photography collections, films, and state-sponsored information guides and handbooks.  

A small number of Scots at the end of the Victorian era and throughout the Edwardian era were eager to live in a world ungoverned by Protestant Christianity and unrestricted by its strict sexual morality.

Cheadle introduces readers to socialists, freethinkers, and writers in Glasgow and Edinburgh who advocated for sexual freedoms grounded in new forms of political, religious, and cultural thought. One example is Jane Hume Clapperton, who was deeply involved in the suffrage movement, described birth control methods in her 1888 novel Margaret Dunmore, and demanded full sexual freedom for women. 

Sexual Progressives brings them to life, showing how they questioned dominant morality and envisioned a way of life in which people could prioritize sexual freedom and pleasure. You won’t forget them.

Every generation believes that they see further and think deeper – and weirder – than every one that came before. From this perspective, we imagine that we can do everything differently that those who preceded us. In this book, one of the creators of the so-called New Journalism shows just how wrong we are. In particular, Talese provides a tour of the history of sexual mores, how cultures reflect those mores, and how tradition turns out to be a more powerful cultural magnet than we expect. We can try to make our own new ways in a lot of areas, but the biological pull we all experience invariably pulls us back to a few tendencies and trends we will likely never shake as a species.

We often assume that the Romans were in love with love but, actually, they could be very divided over it. Love, for some, was not only destructive, it was practically criminal. The author of this academic book looks at the ethics of love and sex in Rome and considers the surprising appeal of ‘sexual virtue’, abstention, and chastity in ancient society. 

It is all very well and good to talk about the sexual revolution in places like New York City or San Francisco. But what did it look like in places like Kansas? This book tells you. It might surprise you that for college students the sexual revolution started with dorm rules in the 1950s. Or that concerns about overpopulation fueled distribution of the Pill. And that women’s liberation was a big deal even in fly-over country. Ultimately, this book makes clear that the changes that we connect with the Sexual Revolution happened in every corner of the United States.

I read Tropic of Cancer at the beginning of my writing career, soon after I’d begun living on my own for the first time. Miller’s life as a Brooklyn boy in Paris, struggling to survive and to write, seemed similar in so many ways to my own life in Manhattan. I’ve since read Tropic of Cancer multiple times and have portions memorized. I went through a phase where everything I wrote came out sounding like Henry Miller—that’s how taken I was by his voice. Miller taught me that it’s possible to write a great book that’s voice-driven rather than plot-driven.

Michel Foucault had a variety of interests and wrote about many different topics – ecology and limits to growth were definitely not among them. I have found this book super useful though in thinking about what I call self-limitation, the processes through which individuals and collectives voluntarily craft the limits of their action and their power. Foucault’s book analyses how ancient Greeks perceived sexuality, and how they managed their bodies and desires. For the Greeks mastery over one’s wants was seen as key to personal freedom and development. Sexual freedom was part and parcel of the self-regulation of sexual desire. I can´t say I understand everything Foucault writes, but this is definitely one of his clearest books, with a more American style short prose than his previous labyrythical French writing. Reading about a civilization that was so similar, but also so different from ours, and how it regulated without suppressing… show more.