Credit where credit is due: Jennifer Spear said this on Saturday morning, and I heartily concur. I’ve done this in two u/g classes in the past few years, and it’s fascinating to see how the class breaks down as to which author they find more persuasive. So far in my classes Block has emerged as the author the students think is more correct (albeit they are depressed to admit it because of her focus on sex as power.) I will be interested to hear what your students decide, since I think I may have an (unwitting) thumb on the scale because I find Block’s version of events more convincing than Lyons’s. That said, I really like and admire Lyons’s book–I just don’t think there was a sexual revolution for women in the late 18th C.

I’m going to be working up a second, revised version of a grad seminar on Gender and Sexuality in Early America for next spring, but I’m finding it more and more difficult to frame the class — trying to do a little bit each of women’s history, gender history, and the history of sexuality means that I don’t really get to do any one of those in the depth I’d like, and the students, who are mostly novices wrt. these issues and who are much more comfortable with social than cultural history (at least in its more theoretical incarnations), get very confused. That said, I’m excited because so much new has appeared that was at best only available in article form the last time I taught the class (including Abraham in Arms, and the book versions of Bloch, Lyons, and Foster). I’d welcome advice & discussion from folks who have taught a similar course.

Finally, one of Kunzel’s points seems particularly interesting to me, and this may be why I find that the history of sexuality sits uneasily in the course I’m trying to frame — from the summary here I kind of take her to be making a Foucauldian point like the one Bruce Burgett makes in his somewhat critical review of Godbeer, that sexuality is a category that gets invented and reshaped over time as a way of organizing and controlling behaviors and bodies by grouping them together and giving them a name/category through which power (via a whole variety of discourses) can operate. In the history of gender, it’s masculinity and femininity or manhood and womanhood that undergo this process, not so much the very notion of gender itself. It seems like even though they’re clearly related in very important ways, the categories don’t exactly match up — they’re of different orders, and demand different theoretical and methodological approaches.