Sex In The Heartland Summary

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During the post war period, Bailey strived to detect the complex issues that changed sex for good in America in her book Sex in the Heartland. The way the national and the local intersected and interacted during the sexual revolution had a tremendous impact on the students of the University of Kansas and the people of Lawrence, Kansas in and out of itself. Bailey’s Sex in the Heartland combined the relations of the national and the local together to present how the postwar period had an impact on the sexual revolution. She argues the crisis of psychologists treating the sexual misconduct of KU students, the Pill and women’s rights as well as the liberation movement both for men and women.
By the end of World War II, the town of Lawrence experienced some major changes. Military personnel known as GIs flooded the campus of KU due to financial aid from the government. A bill known as the GI Bill permitted the military veterans to
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College campus life changed when the gay community of Lawrence created a philosophy and a call to action targeting the gender roles. Bailey stressed that activists of gay and lesbian communities argued that masculine and feminine roles did not just create a gap between men and women but circumscribed the potential of all relationships. “We are gay because we want to relate out of our total beings, whether that essence is at times called feminine or masculine by straight society” is quote Bailey restated in her book Sex in the Heartland from an early manifesto of the Lawrence Gay Liberation Front. The Gay Liberation Front began a string of dances in the town of Lawrence and attracted numerous people from all throughout the nation. This is just one of the many events that rocked the nation that Lawrence, Kansas was a full participant in. They were going to remake sex in the process of remaking gender (Bailey,