Battleground of desire

by Peter N. Stearns

With an emphasis on sex, culture, and discipline of the body, Stearns traces how particular anxieties take root and how they express an inherent tension in the contemporary standards and a stubborn nostalgia for the nineteenth-century regime. Battleground of Desire explodes common wisdom about the twentieth century as tolerant and without norms, emphasizing that most of us follow all sorts of rules, governing everything from adultery to bad breath.