Dale M. Bauer's book, Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860–1940, is one of a number of studies to appear in the years since Foucault's History of Sexuality (1976) reassessing the polemics and rhetoric of sexuality in American and British culture and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not that Bauer herself has more than a passing reference to Foucault, relying much more on Anthony Giddens's modifications of his arguments in The Transformation of Intimacy (1992), and in many ways Bauer's approach to attitudes towards sexuality is very different from Foucault's. She sees her writers constructing their own sexual values, a self-help philosophy at considerable distance from his, and one she describes as the “sexualization of liberal individualism” (18). She says little about nonheterosexual desire, making it clear from the beginning that she sees her work as a contribution to the analysis of “the invention of heterosexuality” (19). Yet at the same time she does, like Foucault, see notions of sexuality as evolving historical formations, arguing in her book that there was a shift in American women's writing from a mid-nineteenth-century emphasis on self-expression to one of ‘sex expression’ at the turn of the century and beyond. The term “sex expression” in Bauer's title was made popular, she tells us, by V. F. Calverton's 1926 book Sex Expression in Literature, though it was already in circulation as early as the 1880s. For Calverton himself, it was “a phrase bridging bodily practice and literary production” (4); like the contemporaneous surrealists in France, he believed that sexual emancipation in word and deed would inevitably lead to “a liberation of the masses” (7). There were women writers in the early part of the century, Bauer argues, who shared Calverton's high hopes for the empowerment and growing equality that sexual freedom would bring them, but, she goes on to suggest, by 1940 this had gradually turned to disillusion or sexual conservatism.

Dale M. Bauer is immensely knowledgeable about the byways of American women writers, and she draws on a wide range of authors, some rarely discussed. Even when she looks at well-known writers, she tends to make use of their lesser-known works. She discusses both polemic writing and novels, by writers canonical and obscure, including Elizabeth Stoddard, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Pauline Hopkins, Rebecca Harding Davis, Angela Heywood, Alice B. Stockham, Kate Chopin, Gertrude Atherton, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Anna Yezierska, Julia Peterkin, Jessie Fauset and Fannie Hurst. Bauer claims that she wants to show that although “modern liberalism helped to make sexuality the predominant sign of individuality, giving it the terms of depth, interiority, and subtextuality to draw on, the writers [she] stud[ies] give sex expression its own literary style” (11, original emphasis). In practice, however, her account concentrates on implied attitudes rather than on language or literary form; there is little close textual reading of the kind found in Joseph Allan Boone's Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (1998), a very different kind of examination of a similar topic and period. Bauer has some fascinating information about early sexual radicals and the antibourgeois pro-sexual freedom rhetoric of the 1920s, and an intriguing account of the nineteenth-century association of ugliness and sexual proclivities, but her chosen method of rapid summary and overview gives her little chance to give life to her literary texts. She notes towards the end that a different choice of texts might have had “a less hopeful take” (218). Perhaps that explains why her account of American women writers' treatment of sexuality eschews such central texts as Chopin's The Awakening, Wharton's House of Mirth and Barnes's Nightwood: their inclusion could well have darkened and complicated her story, but they might also have given her more chance to explore the enticing question she raises of the relationship between literary style and changing concepts of sexuality and self-hood.