Sexing the Millennium: Women and the Sexual Revolution

In her frequently provocative odyssey through the 1960s sexual revolution and its aftermath, London-based freelance journalist Grant explores a window of sexual freedom that opened briefly between the advent of the Pill and the AIDS epidemic. She begins by tracing the roots of modern sexual liberation back to the 17th-century English Ranters, anti-Puritan pacifists who viewed erotic freedom as a liberating agent. Wending through hippie communes, open marriages and sexual freedom advocacy groups from London to San Francisco, Grant pays particular attention to the Catholic Church's declining hold on sexual mores, to the women's health movement and to the 1970s conservative backlash. Calling for a renewal of female sexuality that will overturn the assumption of ``women's monogamy and men's promiscuity,'' she vaguely sketches a sexual future allowing for long-term nonmonogamous relationships that combine love and commitment with casual encounters. (May)