Gail Bederman

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.