The Books They Didn't Want You to Read

Every time you crack open a spicy romance novel in public — on a plane, in a waiting room, cover facing out without apology — you are doing something women before you could not do without consequences.

Not metaphorical consequences. Real ones.

In 1969, Terry Garrity wrote one of the most honest books about female pleasure ever published. She knew exactly what she was doing, which is why she published it under a single letter — "J" — instead of her name. The Sensuous Woman became one of the bestselling books of the decade, because women were hungry for exactly what it offered: plain, frank, unapologetic information about their own bodies and desires that nobody had ever handed them directly before.

Then her publisher leaked her real name to Time magazine.

What followed wasn't fame. It was siege. Invasive demands about her personal life. Multiple attempts at sexual assault. A decline in her mental health so severe it effectively ended her public life. The price of telling women the truth about pleasure, in 1969, was everything.

That same year Irving Wallace published The Seven Minutes — a novel whose entire plot is an obscenity trial over a woman's right to have her interior sexual life rendered in print. It went to court. The question of whether women were allowed to read about their own desire was, in 1969, still considered a legal matter.

Seven years earlier, Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique and been called a monster in disguise. Women wrote into magazines warning that she would destroy the American family. She was accused of jeopardizing the future of the world — because she had suggested that women who wanted more than a domestic role were not aberrations but the majority, quietly suffering in a problem that had no name.

And then there is the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, a group of women who were simply tired of going to male doctors who wouldn't answer their questions. So they went to the medical library themselves, read the texts, and published what they found in a 75-cent stapled booklet. Our Bodies, Ourselves was underground literature before it was a classic. The establishment they defied did not take it quietly.

Behind all of them, further back, is Isabel Burton — who in 1890 sat down in front of her husband Richard's final manuscript and burned it. Every page of a translation he had spent years completing. She did it to protect him from posthumous obscenity prosecution, and she spent the rest of her life branded a villainess for it. She sacrificed her own reputation to protect the work. History returned the favor by forgetting why.

These women are not footnotes. They are the foundation. Every spicy romance on your nightstand, every BookTok video you watch without a second thought, every cover you carry face-out — that freedom was purchased by women who paid for it with their safety, their reputations, and in some cases their sanity.

Read them. Underline them. Pass them on, and vote like your book boyfriend's life depends on it; he needs a hero.

→ The Manuscript She Burned 

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