Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution
A History from Below
15 April 2025
Territory Rights — Worldwide.
Description
Acclaimed historian Jane Kamensky chronicles an indelible twentieth-century American life—and offers an entirely new understanding of the so-called sexual revolution
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.
Reviews
"Assiduously researched, elegantly written." — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker
"Jane Kamensky has written a groundbreaking, cinematic, and sensitive portrait of an unlikely heroine. This is more than a biography of one woman who experienced the perils and pleasures of the sexual revolution ‘from below’—it is a brilliant, sweeping, and tragic history of desire, feminism, and sex in postwar America." — Heather Clark, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
"In the new biography Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution, Kamensky puts Royalle at the center of an ambitious, ambivalent history that aims to unsettle any idea of a conflict with firm battle lines." — Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times
"A tour de force, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution is a penetrating history of America’s least studied revolution.… Originally conceived, impressively researched, and beautifully written, Candida Royalle deepens and complicates our understanding of America’s recent past." — Alice Echols, University of Southern California, and author of Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture
"A riveting, humane, and essential contribution to modern feminist history. Jane Kamensky has written a biography that reads like a novel, an astute intellectual work that recognizes and humanizes the role of sex workers in recent women’s movements. Thanks to this book, I am proud to recognize the place of Candida Royalle in my own lineage." — Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
Also By: Jane Kamensky 
A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley
Paperback, 2017
This bold new history recovers the American Revolution, as seen through the eyes of Boston-born painter John Singleton Copley.
A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley
Hardback, 2016
This bold new history recovers the American Revolution, as seen through the eyes of Boston-born painter John Singleton Copley.
A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley
E Book, 2016
This bold new history recovers the American Revolution, as seen through the eyes of Boston-born painter John Singleton Copley.
Ebook
9781324002093
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£27.99
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