Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution - A History from Below

Whether in front of the camera or behind it, Candice Vadala understood herself as both an artist and an entrepreneur. As Candida Royalle (1950-2015)-underground actress, porn star, producer of adult movies and staunch feminist-she made a business of pleasure. She helped crystallise the broader hedonistic turn in American life in the second half of the twentieth century: a period when the rules of sex were rewritten; when the white-hot "sex wars" cleaved feminism and realigned American politics; when Big Freud, Big Drugs and Big Porn all came into looming focus; when the sex industry of the 1970s and '80s radically upended conventional understandings of law, technology, culture, love and human desire.

With full access to Royalle's remarkable archive, historian Jane Kamensky has spent years examining the intersection of Royalle's life with the clashes that have defined her era-and ours. Deeply informed by these never-before-studied materials, Kamensky explodes the conventions of biography, with its assumptions about who makes history and how. Written with cinematic verve, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution evokes Royalle's times in their broadest contours as Kamensky traces the rise of an improbable heroine who broke the mould and was herself broken in turn.

About the author

Jane Kamensky is the author of A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley, winner of the New-York Historical Society’s American History Book Prize, and professor emerita of history at Harvard University. She is the president of Monticello/the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and has previously served as director of the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Product details

• Authors: Jane Kamensky, Kamensky Jane
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 06.05.2025
• EAN: 9781324105381
• ISBN: 978-1-324-10538-1
• Dimensions: 137 mm x 208 mm x 25 mm
• Weight: 407 g
• Illustrations: 51 illustrations
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women, Biography: general, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women's Studies, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Pornography, Biography: arts & entertainment, Social issues & processes, Gender studies: women, Sex and sexuality, social aspects, Gender studies: women and girls, Biography: arts and entertainment, Sexual Behaviour