‘A Certain Amount of Prudishness’: Nudist Magazines and the Liberalisation of American Obscenity Law, 1947–58

Abstract

In 1947, Sunshine and Health, the flagship magazine of the American nudist movement, challenged the limits of visual display in American society. Exhibiting more than just young, well‐proportioned nude women posing as pinups or centrefolds, it showed parts of the body (breasts, genitalia or buttocks) and types of bodies (male and female, both young and old, ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’, slender and overweight) not normally seen in commercial publications. The legal history of nudist magazines from 1929 to 1963 reveals the contradictions that led to the fall of sexual liberalism and the explosion in eroticism that became a central feature of late twentieth‐century American society.