The Stranger

Gershon Legman was born to poor Hungarian-Romanian immigrants in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1917. This chapter lays out the origins of his interest in collecting erotica and folklore and connects his scholarly beginnings to his childhood and early education. Gershon grew up in the intensely pious world of Orthodox Judaism and was, his parents felt, destined to be a rabbi. His childhood was spent in the study of words and texts. As a boy, he chafed at the prudery of his domineering father, and as an adolescent he was appalled by the American censorship regime that kept accurate sex and birth control information out of the hands of ordinary people. Rejecting his parents’ goals for him, Legman became absorbed with the literature and oral traditions of sex and began his extensive collection of dirty jokes. The author uses Legman’s letters and memoirs to explore the familial and personal origins of his lifelong erotic folklore collecting projects, including his purported kinship to Viennese folklorist Friedrich S. Krauss.

Talking about Birth Control in 1877: Gender, Class, and Ideology in the Knowlton Trial

This article explores the debate around widening access to birth control information in the late nineteenth century through a case study of Annie Besant’s participation in the 1877 Knowlton Trial. Examining Besant’s rhetoric at the trial and in related publications, it highlights the public and performative nature of her campaign to facilitate access to birth control information for working-class married couples. With reference to the representation of issues of gender and social class and the shifting focus from the private to the public in Besant’s rhetoric, the article argues that the late nineteenth-century debate around birth control access was a middle-class debate about working-class life and experience.

Do We Throw Our Privacy Rights Out With the Trash? The Alberta Court of Appeal’s Decision in R. v. Patrick

Grocery lists, birth control information, bank records, and intimate letters to friends past: all are personal items that find their way into the garbage bins of Canadians on a daily basis.1 Canadians have come to expect that once a garbage bag is thrown in a bin behind a home, it makes a direct uninterrupted trip to a landfill, a place where its contents will remain private through the decomposition process. Few realize that, quite frequently, the police, as state agents charged with the responsibility of solving criminal cases, sift through the discarded items of Canadians in the hunt for valuable information. This police behaviour raises two important constitutional questions...

Practical Sex Education for the Mentally Retarded: What the Rehabilitation Counselor Needs to Know

Should sex education be an important topic covered in our planning for independent living for the retarded? Given the fact that many retarded persons have or will be involved in sexual activity, let us take a practical look at some of the issues involved. Birth control information should be delivered and a positive attitude toward one's own body and sexuality in general should be promoted. This article takes a practical approach to these questions, attempts to answer some and creates a few more.