Sexual violence as founding narrative: Edna Gertrude Beasley’s My First Thirty Years

This essay argues that Gertrude Beasley's little-known memoir My First Thirty Years (Contact Editions, 1925) makes important contributions to the history of sexuality. Beasley's focus on sexual violence and its relationship with sexual development shifts our attention from object choice, the field's center of gravity, to the role of violence in individual and national sexual history. Moreover, I argue that Beasley both employs and argues with the work of published male sexologists, thus offering a type of vernacular sexology. Although Beasley's memoir was widely suppressed and remains out of print, this essay repositions her as an important voice on American sexuality around the turn of the twentieth century.