Jillian DachmanHistory 392, Dr. Lapsley3.30.14The years between 1890 and 1930 witnessed fundamental changes in sexual mores and practices, the reorientation of marriage towards relationships of companionship, the emergence of distinct sexual taxonomies, and the shift from Victorian silence about the body and sexuality to the emergence of a new psychological language about sex. Despite the prevailing social attitude of sexual repression in the Victorian era, the movement towards sexual emancipation began towards the end of the 19th century and brought with it profound changes in attitudes towards female sexuality, homosexuality, premarital sexuality and sexual freedom. expression. The new norms of pleasure have highlighted a rhetoric of normative conceptual frameworks postulated by "sexologists" who have delivered psycho-medicalized sexuality to the masses of largely uninformed readers, thirsty for information and explanations. Men and women, reading the work of sex theorists such as Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud, had different views on sex than their parents before them. The Victorian sexual counterculture contributed to the awareness of a radical change that became the social matrix of sexual liberalism. Sexual liberation, therefore, can be seen as the result of a process that saw the significant loss of power of the values ​​of the early 19th century moral tradition and the rise of a more socially and sexually permissive society. Tolerant attitudes of greater sexual freedom and experimentation became widespread and were captured in the concept of modernization. New recreational venues where men and women could meet and engage in unrestricted social interactions brought about a change in the average American's experience of courtship and sexuality. .... middle of paper ... In Victorian society, sexual liberalism transformed the way people organized their private lives. Moving from a Victorian environment of production, separate sexual spheres, and relegation of any illicit extramarital sex to an underworld of vice, the modern era found itself in a new landscape of consumerism, modernism, and inverted sexual stereotypes. Sexuality was now discussed, systematized, controlled, and made the object of scientific study and popular discourse. Late 19th-century views of “natural” gender and sexuality, with attendant stereotypes about appropriate gender roles and desires, have persisted long into the 20th century and continue, somewhat fitfully, to inform the world in which we live. It is against this cultural and political horizon that the understanding of sexuality in the modern era must be contextualized.