Civil liberties in the United States have, until recently, lacked a robust social history. Efforts to trace their lineage have remained largely on doctrinal terrain, divorced from the broader world in which legal and cultural meaning were articulated and negotiated.

Leigh Ann Wheeler's important new book, How Sex Became a Civil Liberty, is among a crop of recent and forthcoming works that aim to enrich our historical understanding. Its subject is the process by which “sexual expression, practice, and privacy” (4) entered the American civil liberties agenda. Although civil liberties advocates shared an aversion to state suppression of political and economic speech, they split—often along race and gender lines—over state regulation in the realm of sexuality. Spanning the twentieth century, the book brings together such far-ranging issues as birth control, pornography, abortion, rape, gay rights, and sexual harassment. It convincingly demonstrates that these seemingly distinct undertakings were bound up with an overarching, if evolving, conversation about individual rights.

Wheeler's focus is the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which “helped to shape a distinctive and also polarized American sexual culture even as it contributed to the emergence of a broad consensus on the sanctity of freedom of speech and sexual privacy” (4). With subtlety and compassion, Wheeler recovers the “tangled, experimental, and often tormented intimate relationships” that molded the ideological commitments and social mores of the ACLU's leaders and lawyers (37). The book is populated with deeply textured characters whose unconventional private lives affected their public ambitions. Drawing on archival records as well as personal interviews, Wheeler foregrounds conflict and contradiction; personal experiences, she suggests, translated into theoretical understandings and organizational goals.

Professional connections mattered, too. Wheeler emphasizes the importance of “cross-pollination” between the ACLU and the “single-issue organizations” with which its leadership was involved (94). ACLU activists and attorneys brought their civil liberties orientation to efforts on behalf of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Kinsey Institute, and the Association for Voluntary Sterilization, among other groups. By the same token, the concerns and priorities of those organizations infused the ACLU's civil liberties work and influenced its program.

Among the book's central contributions is its concept of “consumer rights,” a label that defies neat categorization but usefully captures the individualist orientation of the modern civil liberties movements. Wheeler identifies a fundamental transformation during the mid-twentieth century in the way civil liberties were justified and understood. Increasingly, she argues, Americans abandoned their ideal of a public forum “for the exchange of ideas and information among citizens of a polity” in favor of a new “marketplace of buyers and sellers, consumers and producers,” which pandered to individual tastes (85). Although the early ACLU leadership had railed against “capitalist and commercial exploitation,” the organization increasingly defended speech circulated for profit and entertainment (59). Its relationships with such prominent commercial producers as Playboy magazine helped to redefine popular understandings of civil liberties. The new conception valorized personal choice, and by the mid-1970s the ACLU considered commercial advertisements to be fully protected by the First Amendment.

According to Wheeler, the ACLU's embrace of consumer rights was bound up with its contested vision of sexual privacy. When feminists demanded freedom from unwelcome sexual imagery or sexual advances in the home or workplace, the ACLU underscored consumers' access to sexual content. By promoting a right to engage publicly in intimate expression and even behavior, at the expense of such initiatives as hostile environment sexual harassment law, it blurred the line between public and private.

A related theme is the ACLU's changing relationship to state power. Members clashed over whether government intervention might serve civil liberties—for example, by providing state funded birth control to poor women—or would instead precipitate abuses, such as compulsory sterilization. The latter view prevailed, and the ACLU's vocabulary varied in tandem with its policy perspective; in the early 1970s, the organization substituted its Reproductive Freedom Project for its former work on reproductive “control” (141). By contrast, legal solutions to rape and sexual harassment entailed “protections by the state from other individuals” (211). Many within the ACLU, however, remained skeptical of affirmative state involvement.

How Sex Became a Civil Liberty is an illuminating study of twentieth century sexual culture in the United States. Although it has much to offer to legal historians, Wheeler advises readers that it is not “a traditional legal or constitutional history” (7). Both courts and constitutional law, which unduly dominate many histories of civil liberties, play minor roles in Wheeler's account. So too do the shifting parameters of legal argument. Wheeler shows us why civil liberties advocates revised and expanded their visions of civil liberties during the twentieth century; to understand why legal institutions accepted and implemented those visions, more work remains to be done. No doubt there are significant connections between the legal apparatus of civil liberties during the twentieth century and the messy cultural trends that Wheeler so deftly describes.

Accessible and elegantly written, How Sex Became a Civil Liberty is packed with suggestive, productive, and provocative insights that merit extended treatment. It resists the celebratory vein so prominent in previous scholarship, instead emphasizing the tensions and tradeoffs between civil liberties and other values, including bodily integrity and racial justice. It is a rich invitation for further work in an emerging field with powerful implications for the study of cultural contestation and constitutional change.