University of Mary Washington

Assistant Editor, Papers of James Monroe

Other Affiliations: University of Pennsylvania, History

Thesis Title: “‘A Golden Mean’: Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic, 1780-1830”

About

My project argues that friendships between men and women helped create the social fabric of the new nation. In a republican polity that relied on the virtuous bonds of its citizenry, heterosocial friendships gave women an entry point into the civic body and tied together political, social, and religious circles.  I argue that these friendships flourished outside of prescribed gender roles and relationships, with men and women improvising to create fulfilling friendships within the bounds of propriety. That space for improvisation and the egalitarian relationships created between men and women suggest that the sexual and gender systems in this era were not as constraining as historians have imagined.  Men and women could make what they would of these friendships, adapting the dynamics of power and the meanings of gender and sex.

My work is interdisciplinary, with particular interests in anthropology, art, and literature. My interest in historical research began with a project comparing a husband and wife's diaries when I was 18, and since then my interests have broadened through work at the Supreme Court, an archaeology dig, and jobs at art museums at the Smithsonian. I have presented my work at the Smithsonian Institution, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Newberry Library, and the American Historical Association.

I defended my dissertation on January 20, 2012 and will graduate in May.