Going All the Way

At once an affectionate tribute and a work of social history, Going All the Way follows four hundred teenage girls' thoughts and experiences during one of the most remarkable eras in the history of sex, gender, and adolescence - the brief and amazing period when teenage girls knew of almost no reason not to have sex.

The feminist scholar Sharon Thompson first began to listen to teenage girls' tales about their sexual and romantic experiences in the late 1970s, soon after they had gained the right to contraception. For almost ten years, she interviewed girls across the country, in shopping malls and pizza parlors, under highway trestles and in public parks. Her brilliant and moving account of what she heard captures teenage girls' first startled responses to the radically new rules of sex and romance and their efforts to shape new ways of being sexual out of such long-standing adolescent preoccupations as popularity, alienation, and best-friendship. In her interpretation, Thompson begins to make sense of many aspects of teenage sexual behavior that survey research has failed to explain: the persistent, exasperating discrepancies, for example, between what teenagers know and what they do - discrepancies that are more critical than ever, given the danger of AIDS.