Two high school seniors believe their love to be so strong that it will last forever.

Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change. Drawing on surveys on Americans' changing behavior over the past twenty-five years, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether the PTA, church, recreation clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. Our shrinking access to the "social capital" that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing is a serious threat to our civic and personal health. The loss of social capital is felt in critical ways : communities with less social capital have lower educational performance and more teen pregnancy, child suicide, low birth weight, and prenatal mortality. Social capital is also a strong predictor of crime rates, other measures of neighborhood quality of life, and health. America has faced this crisis before. At the turn of the last century, social capital was at low ebb, reduced by urbanization, industrialization, and vast immigration that uprooted Americans from their friends, social institutions, and families. Faced with this challenge, the country righted itself. Within a few decades, a range of organizations was created, from the Red Cross, Boy Scouts, and YWCA to Hadassah and the Knights of Columbus and the Urban League and social capital was rebuilt. Putnam calls on Americans to start the process again.

In the 1990s Americans are divided on virtually every issue surrounding sexuality. Emotion and political passion have come to dominate sexual matters, and the debates on teenage pregnancy, pornography, homosexuality, abortion, and AIDS reveal deep social conflicts. The sexual sphere is so entangled that it defies analysis or even description. In Embattled Eros Steven Seidman seeks to clarify some of the major dynamics and patterns of contemporary American intimate culture. He shows that at the root of the major conflicts are two sexual ideologies, the libertarian and the romanticist. Examining the strengths and limits of each ideology, he suggests broad outlines for a sexual ethic that goes beyond the current polarization. In part one Seidman argues that we should reject our usual way of looking at recent history--a sexual revolution in the '60s followed by a conservative backlash in the '80s, an ongoing struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of repression. Between the '60s and the '80s he argues, there transpired neither a sexual revolution nor counter-revolution but a heightened conflict over the meaning of sex, its relation to pleasure, romance, and self-identity, its proper moral role in private and public life. In part two Seidman's primary purpose is to analyze moral arguments over sexual norms and practices. He chooses the sex debates that occurred within feminism and the gay male community in the late '70s through the '80s as his sites for moral engagement, as it is here that the debate over sexual ethics has been given its fullest elaboration. In conclusion, Seidman offers a pragmatic ethic that revolves around the concept of sexual and social responsibility as a bridge between libertarians and romanticists. The main issue is how to preserve the expansive notion of sexual choice, diversity, and pleasure contained in the libertarian ethic yet also retain standards that allow us to offer social and personal criticisms of intimate life. Building on the work presented in Romantic Longings, the author's history of intimacy in the United States, Embattled Eros presents a sophisticated yet accessible analysis of contemporary sexual life and its moral conflicts. Emphasizing feminist and lesbian and gay issues, the book is for all readers interested in contemporary sexuality.

The only book to cover the entire history of birth control and the intense controversies about reproduction rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years, The Moral Property of Women is a thoroughly updated and revised version of the award-winning historian Linda Gordon's classic history Woman's Body, Woman's Right, originally published in 1976. Arguing that reproduction control has always been central to women's status, The Moral Property of Women shows how opposition to it has long been part of the conservative opposition to gender equality. From its roots in folk medicine and in a campaign so broad it constituted a grassroots social movement at some points in history, to its legitimization through public policy, the widespread acceptance of birth control has involved a major reorientation of sexual values. In three new chapters and updates throughout, Gordon addresses birth control and public policy, the intense abortion debates of the past thirty years, and a host of issues that extend from abortion controversies, including sterilization, teenage pregnancy and childbearing, and stem-cell research. Illuminating the conflicts and politics at the core of birth control issues through a historical lens, The Moral Property of Women places today's "choice" versus "right-to-life" movements in the context of the campaign that first prohibited abortion in the mid-nineteenth century and the campaign that legalized contraception in the early twentieth century. From the earliest attempts of women to organize for the legal control of their bodies to the effects of second-wave feminism, Gordon defines the role that birth control has played in society's attitudes towardwomen, sexuality, and gender equality. Highlighting the leaders of the struggle and their actions, The Moral Property of Women chronicles the contributions of notorious reproductive control activists such as Margaret Sanger as well as lesser-known pioneers including the utopian socialist Robert Dale Owen, the women's rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the three doctors Foote -- Edward Bliss Foote, Edward Bond Foote, and Mary Bond Foote -- the anarchists Ezra Heywood and Emma Goldman, the civil libertarian Mary Ware Dennett, and abortion rights advocates of the 1970s.

"Part activist memoir, part crash course in Jewish and Palestinian history, Genocide Bad dismantles Zionist propaganda and maps a course towards collective liberation in ten unapologetic essays. Drawing connections between Biblical promises and exploding pagers, medieval dress codes and modern-day apartheid, Kern sketches a sweeping history of imperialism with their characteristic blend of far-ranging research, pop-culture insights, and scathing humor. Kern, a former teacher, journalist, novelist, and book influencer, gained international recognition as an anti-Zionist Jewish activist in the days after October 7th, 2023. At a time when social media was flooded with 'I Stand with Israel' posts, Kern started sharing content encouraging their followers to read Palestinian books, learn Palestinian history, and question Western reporting on Palestine--videos which went viral into tens of millions of views. Despite facing hate messages, death threats, and exile from the Zionist Jewish community, Kern has remained steadfast in their advocacy over the past year. They've posted daily videos on Palestinian, Jewish, and colonial history, and they've raised over $500,000 in direct aid for families in Gaza--all while navigating the challenges of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting a newborn. In Genocide Bad, Kern reflects on the life experiences that led them to anti-Zionist activism, while capturing and expanding upon their online educational content. Kern doesn't flinch when confronting the horrors of genocides past and present, but there is also tremendous hope contained in these pages--hope that springs from examples of courage and resilience in the face of extreme violence, and from the kinds of resistance that might just lead to our collective liberation."--

In Viña Delmar's breakthrough novel, "Bad Girl," the author takes readers on a gripping journey through the tenements and working-class married life of 1920s America. Published in 1928, this cautionary tale delves into the controversial themes of premarital sex, pregnancy, and childbirth. The unexpected and immediate sensation of the novel led to its notoriety, even facing a ban in Boston initially. Despite the challenges, "Bad Girl" soared to new heights, becoming the Literary Guild's April 1928 selection and climbing the Publishers Weekly fiction bestseller list to peak at No. 4. Step into the world of societal taboos and forbidden love in this compelling narrative that captivated readers and secured its place as a bestseller in 1928.

THE VIVID, SCANDAL-FILLED STORY OF A SHREWD, RAGS-TO-RICHES MILLIONAIRESS AND THE RUTHLESS POLITICIAN WHO PURSUED HER, TOLD AGAINST THE EFFERVESCENT BACKDROP OF AMERICA’S GOLDEN CITY—SAN FRANCISCO. San Francisco, until the mid-1940s, was a city that lived by its own rules, fast and loose. Formed by the gold rush and destroyed by the 1906 earthquake, it served as a pleasure palace for the legions of men who sought their fortunes in the California foothills. For the women who followed, their only choice was to support, serve, or submit. Inez Burns was different. She put everyone to shame with her dazzling, calculated, stone-cold ambition. Born in the slums of San Francisco to a cigar-rolling alcoholic, Inez transformed herself into one of California’s richest women, becoming a notorious powerbroker, grand dame, and iconoclast. A stunning beauty with perfumed charm, she rose from manicurist to murderess to millionaire, seducing one man after another, bearing children out of wedlock, and bribing politicians and cops along the way to secure her place in the San Francisco firmament. Inez ruled with incandescent flair. She owned five hundred hats and a closet full of furs, had two small toes surgically removed to fit into stylish high heels, and had two ribs excised to accentuate her hourglass figure. Her presence was defined by couture dresses from Paris, red-carpet strutting at the San Francisco Opera, and a black Pierce-Arrow that delivered her everywhere. She threw outrageous parties on her sprawling, eight-hundred-acre horse ranch, a compound with servants, cooks, horse groomers, and trainers, where politicians, judges, attorneys, Hollywood moguls, and entertainers gamboled over silver fizzes. Inez was adored by the desperate women who sought her out—and loathed by the power-hungry men who plotted to destroy her. During a time when women risked their lives with predatory practitioners lurking in back alleys, Inez and her team of women, clad in crisp, white nurse’s uniforms, worked night and day in her elegantly appointed clinic, performing fifty thousand of the safest, most hygienic abortions available during a time when even the richest wives, Hollywood stars, and mistresses had few options when they found themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. Inez’s illegal business bestowed upon her power and influence—until a determined politician by the name of Edmund G. (Pat) Brown—the father of current California Governor Jerry Brown—used Inez to catapult his nascent career to national prominence. In The Audacity of Inez Burns , Stephen G. Bloom, the author of the bestselling Postville, reveals a jagged slice of lost American history. From Inez’s riveting tale of glamour and tragedy, he has created a brilliant, compulsively readable portrait of an unforgettable woman during a moment when America’s pendulum swung from compassion to criminality by punishing those who permitted women to control their own destinies.