Introduction : The Unlikely Rhetorical Allies of Science and Free-Love Feminism -- The Season of Battle : The Rhetoric of Free-Love Feminism in Nineteenth-Century America -- Evolutionary Theory : (R)Evolutionary Rhetorics in the Free-Love Movement -- Physiology : Rewriting the Body and Sexual Desire -- Bacteriology : Marriage as a "Diseased" Institution -- Embryology : Toward a Eugenic Warrant for Free-Love Feminism -- Heredity : The Disappearing Reform Warrant -- Conclusion : Historiography and Feminist Uses of Eugenics
Summary
In this book, the author explores the relationship between scientific and feminist rhetorics in free-love feminism, studying the movement from its inception in the 1850s to its dark turn toward eugenics in the early 1900s. The author organizes her provocative study by scientific discipline - evolution, physiology, bacteriology, embryology, and heredity. Each chapter explores how free-love feminists adopted the evidence of that discipline in their arguments for increased sex education, women's sexual rights, reproductive freedom, and the abolition of a marriage system that repressed the rights and the sexuality of women
