Cassandra A. Good, "Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic" (Oxford UP, 2015)

Summary

Cassandra A. Good is the Associate Editor of the Papers of James Monroe at the University of Mary Washington. Her book Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a historical examination of the cross-gender friendships that formed against great social odds and popular opinion that held that these relationships were highly irregular and impossible to maintain chaste. Beginning with the relationships of Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson; Eloise Richards Payne and William Ellery Channing; Charles Greely Loring and Mary Pierce and their elite circle, Good explores the depth of feelings, the language and tokens of love, issues of propriety, and the social and political risks of cross-gender friendship. These complicated relationships embodied the essential republican values of equality, freedom, choice, and virtue and challenged marriage as the ultimate human connection. Through her historical work, Good offers an opportunity to rethink the ways cross-gender friendships remain problematic.
Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation.

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Lilian Calles Barger

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the cultural and intellectual history of women and the origins of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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