Sex, in any age, can always be counted on to titillate the public. In the 1920s, however, it seemed sex was everywhere. Theatrical plays and vaudeville skits often were based on sexual themes, and theaters were sometimes shut down by vice squads for showing "obscene" entertainment. Books, too, were becoming more risque, and it was up to the post office—which kept a list of over five hundred banned titles—to stop this perceived obscenity from being sent through the mail.

Some moralists blamed the sexual revolution of the twenties on the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud. Although the Austrian psychiatrist completed his most important work, The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1900, his theories became part of popular culture in the United States after World War I.

Freud believed that sexual repression was the cause of most neurosis, and this belief was quickly...