Bess Pfeiffer didn’t mean to start anything when she walked into Honey Finnegan’s house with seven copies of *The Joy of Sex*. She thought it would be fun. Their group had been meeting for years and even though it started as something that kind of sort of resembled the consciousness raising groups they’d been reading about, it had, predictably, become a watered-down suburban version of consciousness raising. The wives and mothers of Cambridge Road weren’t talking politics or sex or activism or civil rights or even a light, sugarcoated feminism, but mostly trying to help each other as their children climbed the slippery shoals of adolescence to the sebum-soaked years of puberty. They discussed teachers and curfews and their concerns about cigarettes and liquor and peer pressure.…