Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Lyons's provocative study illuminates a surprising post-Revolutionary world."
Kathleen M. Brown, University of Pennsylvania
Review
"Required reading for anyone who wants to understand the foundations of modern sexuality."
Suzanne D. Lebsock, Rutgers University
Review
"[A] bold, wide-ranging, and deeply researched book. . . . Refreshingly, it places at the center of analysis the issues of desire and pleasure. . . . The heroes of this book are lusty women shaping their own destinies, satisfying their desires, and pursuing sexual pleasure. . . . Placing provocative interpretations on the table, [it] succeeds admirably."
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Review
"Social history of the highest quality."
Early American Literature
Review
"Comprehensive. . . .Meticulous archival work and inventive interpretive strategies."
-- Early American Literature
Review
"An impressive scholarly accomplishment. . . . So engaging and intriguing that, after four hundred pages, the reader wants more."
-- Historian
Review
"Masters the unstable terrain of sexualities and power relations, and gives readers a new, compelling, and politically significant way to understand the transformations underway in the age of revolutions."
-- Journal of the Early Republic
Review
"Important and comprehensive . . . likely to become the major point of reference for anyone studying sexual practices and gender politics during the founding of the American republic."
Eighteenth-Century Life
Review
"The book brims over with a brilliant fusion of social, cultural, and intellectual history."
Gary B. Nash, University of California at Los Angeles
About the Author
Clare A. Lyons is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland.