The relationship between feminism and sexuality in the long twentieth century is both complex and multifaceted. Whether sexuality is understood as congenital or acquired, defined by object choice or aim, central to the character of an individual or the health of a population, it is a highly contested and contradictory set of discourses and institutional practices. Feminism is similarly impossible to define as a coherent ideology or political praxis. At once a historically specific political and cultural phenomenon emerging in the first decades of the twentieth century, feminism is also a highly differentiated transnational event that belies a single origin, set of beliefs, or constituency. Organized around two key historical figures–the modern girl and the feminist-as-lesbian–this essay draws on feminist, queer, and historical studies of the world-wide feminist movements of the 1910s-1930s, and of the women’s liberation era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to trace the connections between the commodification and politicization of women’s sexuality as two axes around which the unsettled and generative relationship between modern sexuality and feminism revolves.

The massive cultural and social changes brought about by World War II and its aftermath enabled what came to be known as the “sexual revolution.” This chapter highlights some key novels and literary movements that responded to and helped shape the postwar discourse of sexual freedom. It attends first to battles over literary censorship in the first half of the 1960s, focusing on celebrated obscenity trials of the work of Henry Miller and William Burroughs. The chapter then turns to novelistic engagements with queer liberation, discussing the work of James Baldwin, Edmund White, Rita Mae Brown, and Leslie Feinberg, among others. Using these literary examples, it demonstrates how tensions between individualism and collectivism that are longstanding in the American political project play out in and are transformed by ideas of sexual liberation.