Disorderly Conduct

This first collection of essays by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg one of the leading historians of women is a landmark in women''s studies. Focusing on the disorderly conduct women and some men used to break away from the Victorian Era''s rigid class and sex roles it examines the dramatic changes in male-female relations family structure sex social custom and ritual that occurred as colonial America was transformed by rapid industrialization. Included are two now classic essays on gender relations in 19th-century America The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America and The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Order and Gender Crisis 1870-1936 as well as Smith-Rosenberg''s more recent work on abortion homosexuality religious fanatics and revisionist history. Throughout Disorderly Conduct Smith-Rosenberg startles and convinces making us re-evaluate a society we thought we understood a society whose outward behavior and inner emotional life now take on a new meaning.