Department of History

20th Century United States; Gender, Race and Sexuality; Conservative Activism; Religion and Culture; Youth and Childhood; GLBTQ Studies

I am currently revising my book, Save Our Children: Sexual Politics and Cultural Conservatism in the United States, 1965-1990, which is slated to be published with University of Pennsylvania Press.

Save Our Children explores how social and political movements redefined the meaning of citizenship and civil rights between 1965 and 1990 by deeming certain political and cultural transformations as harmful to children. It concentrates on five interrelated episodes: Nixon-era cultural and political narratives on the “permissive society” and the dangers posed by the New Left to youth in the 1970s and 1980s; Anita Bryant’s anti-gay movement, Save Our Children; the racial politics of anti-abortion struggles in Michigan in the mid-1970s; the anti-pornography feminist organization, Women Against Pornography; and Tipper Gore’s anti-obscenity movement, Parents’ Music Resource Center.

Through these studies, my project analyzes conservatism’s complex relationship with childhood and maps four interrelated processes: the movement of conservative ideas and activists from the margins to center of American politics and culture after WWII; the ways in which liberal and left wing individuals, social movements and politicians were pushed or actively traveled rightward; the politicization, construction and enforcement of sexual and gender norms in the wake of the so-called “sexual revolution”; and the attempts by conservatives to counter or roll back the gains of the civil rights movement. In so doing, I underscore how these child protection movements helped shape national conversations and public policy about the meaning and practice of family values, civil rights and popular forms of expression.