Gail Bederman

Associate Professor
Department of History

Degrees

B.F.A., New York University; M.A., Ph.D., Brown University

Research Profile

Bederman, a historian of US gender and sexuality, authored Manliness and Civilization (Chicago, 1995). She is currently writing a two-volume history of the earliest public advocacy of contraception in Britain and the USA, concentrating on the forgotten interactions of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, T.R. Malthus, Francis Place, Richard Carlile, Robert Dale Owen, and Frances Wright. The nearly completed first volume, The Worst Sort of Property: Population, Marriage, and Sexual Radicalism in England, 1793-1803, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Volume two is entitled The Very First Reproductive Rights Movement: ‘Preventives,’ Freethought, and Sexual Radicalism in Britain and the USA, 1820-1832. A selection from that project, “Revisiting Nashoba,” was anthologized in The Best American History Essays 2007. 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."

Contact Information

255 Decio Faculty Hall
631-7789
bederman.1@nd.edu
http://www.nd.edu/~gbederma