Gail Bederman
Associate Professor of History
Field
U.S. History, specializing in the histories of gender, sexuality and women.
Profile
Bederman received her A.M. and Ph.D. from Brown University (1992) and is the author of Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the U.S., 1890-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 1995). Her articles relating to this phase of her scholarships include "Civilization, the Decline of Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B. Wells's Anti-Lynching Campaign (1892-1894)." Radical History Review 52, (Winter 1992) and " 'The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough:’ The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911-1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-class Protestantism." American Quarterly 14 (1989). Since 1995, she has been working on a revisionist history of the American reproductive rights movement. Bederman also writes and speaks on two related topics: "Why the History of Sexuality Should be Taught in Catholic Universities," and "Why Catholic Theology is a Useful Resource for Historians of Sexuality."
Current Project
Bederman is writing a two-volume history of the earliest public advocacy of contraception in Britain and the USA, concentrating on the forgotten interactions of seven activist/ intellectuals, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, T.R. Malthus, Francis Place, Richard Carlile, Robert Dale Owen, and Frances Wright. The first volume, entitled The Worst Sort of Property: Population, Marriage, and Sexual Radicalism in England, 1793-1803, is nearly finished and under contract with the University of Chicago Press. The second volume is entitled The Very First Reproductive Rights Movement: ‘Preventives,’ Freethought, and Sexual Radicalism in Britain and the USA, 1820-1832. An article taken from the second volume “Revisiting Nashoba: Slavery, Utopia and Frances Wright in America, 1818-1826,” was selected for the Organization of American Historians' anthology, The Best American History Essays 2007.
Teaching Interests
Gender, women's history, and the history of sexuality; gender studies; interdisciplinary studies of sexuality and morality.
Recent Publications
"Sex, Scandal, Satire, and Population in 1798: Revisiting Malthus's First Essay " Journal of British Studies Forthcoming (Fall, 2008)
“Revisiting Nashoba: Slavery, Utopia and Frances Wright in America, 1818-1826,” American Literary History (2005); reprinted in The Best American History Essays 2007 (Palgrave, 2007)
Contact
Email: bederman.1@nd.edu
Web:
http://www.nd.edu/~gbederma