This book will be fodder for Constitutional originalists, but it will absorb the attention of broad audiences that include legal and political historians; those interested in the history of women, gender, and sexuality; and general readers alike. In an engaging style and with impeccable organization and analysis, Leigh Ann Wheeler explains how laws and constitutional interpretation developed since the early 1900s to protect individual rights related to sexual expression. Defining “sex” expansively, she examines struggles over contraception, sterilization and abortion, nudism, censorship of sexually explicit materials, prostitution, homosexuality, rape, sexual harassment, and more. Her research is equally expansive, including the papers of and interviews with dozens of her subjects, as well as the records of organizations, most prominently those of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Wheeler's focus on the American Civil Liberties Union is apt, even though it was not the only voice for sexual rights and, as she acknowledges, “was rarely in the vanguard” (4) on any particular issue. The ACLU is central because it embraced a wide range of issues related to sexual expression, put them into a civil liberties context, and sustained a defense of sexual liberty throughout its history. Wheeler shows how the First Amendment rights of assembly and speech first drew the ACLU into the defense of birth-control advocates and then how the organization moved from defending speech to defending sexual practice itself through the development of a constitutional right to privacy, a process that extended over decades. Similarly, the ACLU stood behind homosexuals first when rights to speech or due process were at risk but eventually came to defend all adult consensual behavior. Throughout the book, Wheeler shows how advocates of sexual freedom gradually erased the lines they had initially drawn between commercial and noncommercial speech and between private and public behavior.

This work is immensely more than a study of the policies and legal cases promulgated by the ACLU national leadership. Wheeler's examination of local affiliates demonstrates that local chapters were often ahead of the national board in expanding the boundaries of sexual rights, as was the case with homosexuality. Her observation of the private lives of key individuals, such as Roger Baldwin, Dorothy Kenyon, Harriet Pilpel, and Arthur Cyrus Warner, illuminates connections between their personal values, experiences, and relationships on the one hand, and their public advocacy on the other. By investigating other key organizations, such as the American Birth Control League, the American Law Institute, and Playboy magazine, Wheeler discerns how the ACLU both cooperated and disagreed with other parties over the meanings of sexual rights and the means by which to achieve them. She shows that while the ACLU concentrated on legal arguments, it also worked with allies to mobilize public opinion and pressure public officials. And she is always alive to the larger historical environment, pointing out, for example, that the ACLU moved from protecting the right to speak to protecting the right to consume speech (in this case access to sexual material and conduct) in the context of a burgeoning consumer culture in American society.

Very few of the stands taken by the ACLU and its allies were givens, but instead developed out of often fierce debates that went on for years as advocates for sexual liberty took on new issues, decided priorities, and tried to resolve claims for rights that competed with one another. Such conflicts became more intense after the 1960s, when women gained influence in the organization and feminists raised issues that threw one right into conflict with another. For example, civil libertarians argued over the right of rape victims to keep their sexual histories private versus the right of accused criminals to the best possible defense; they debated whether it was more important to protect the right to free expression or the right to be free of sexual harassment. Wheeler meticulously lays out the arguments on all sides of these and other disagreements, concluding that certain losses accompanied the establishment of sex as a civil liberty. The right to privacy gave individuals much more control over their sexual and reproductive lives, but that gain also elevated the right to sexual expression over the right to be free from unwanted sex. And that prioritizing had a particular impact on women, for, as Wheeler writes, “it is primarily through the bodies of girls and women that this culture's sexual expression takes place” (222). This is among many insights that make this book not only a distinguished contribution to US twentieth-century history but also a foundation for understanding the ongoing debates about sexual freedom and sexual equality.