Kelly Morrow

Ph.D. Student
kamorrow@email.unc.edu

Major Field: United States History

Other Fields: Women's History

Advisor: Jacquelyn Hall

Research Interests: The sexual revolution is often remembered by the American public, and in particular by the New Right, as a time when America’s youth engaged in a hedonistic sexual free-for-all.  My dissertation argues instead that the sexual revolution was evolutionary, multifaceted, and that at its core lay what I am calling the “sexual liberation movement.”  Ignited by the lack of information available to sexually active students on college campuses in the late 1960s, men and women, heterosexuals and
homosexuals, and youth and adults joined together on American college campuses across the country to develop discourses and services that taught an ethic of responsibility, encouraged an acceptance of diverse sexual identities, and promoted gender equality.  This movement was both a reaction to and an aspect of broad changes in sexual attitudes and behaviors that rocked America in the 1960s.  Its aim was to bring order to young, unmarried people’s sexual lives.  The sexual liberation movement emerged at the nexus of the sexual revolution, the New Left, and women’s liberation, but it was unique in drawing together such issues as reproductive rights, gay rights, and heterosexual relationships under an all-encompassing ideology of sexual rights.