| "Sex and the Student Body" seeks to revise popular and scholarly understandings of the sexual revolution by viewing it through the prism of New Left activism on college campuses from 1960 to 1973. This upheaval in manners and mores is often remembered as a sexual free-for-all based on individual gratification. Research in university archives, campus papers, and oral history interviews, however, reveals that at the center of the sexual revolution on college campuses were "sexual liberation activists" who offered students a new framework for understanding their sexual and emotional relationships grounded in the principle of equality. Far from advocating sexual license, these activists responded to a changing sexual culture by linking liberation to knowledge and responsibility. Through sexual health clinics, courses, handbooks, and counseling services, a coalition of faculty and students worked together to build institutions and create a more democratic university. Inspired by the liberation movements of the 1960s, men and women joined forces to advocate for equality and reproductive justice, and they attempted to change the gender consciousness of men as well as women in order to promote sexual relationships based on mutual honesty, trust, and pleasure. |
