Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860-1940

American women novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries registered a call for a new sexual freedom, Dale Bauer contends. By creating a lexicon of "sex expression," many authors explored sexuality as part of a discourse about women''s needs rather than confining it to the realm of sentiments, where it had been relegated (if broached at all) by earlier writers. This new rhetori...