Patricia Cline Cohen: “Sex and Sexuality in the Early Republic”

Patricia Cline Cohen, history professor at UC Santa Barbara, will speak on Oct. 27, 7 pm, in Ayres 106. She is an expert on American social and women’s histories and the author of The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in 19th-Century New York and A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America. Her lecture highlights classic and recent scholarship exploring private sexual behavior, public regulation of sexuality, and challenges to the institution of marriage in the early republic.

Cohen has linked these early issues to those faced by students today: “The first forty years of the new nation were characterized by legal, economic, and cultural changes … Many of these same kinds of long-term trends and processes undergird the significant influences in their [students’] own lives today, where ideas about the value of work, sexuality, family life, and the relative equality of the sexes are all still contested and in flux.” (Excerpted from “Women in the Early Republic,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, Vol. 14, No. 2, Winter 2000.)

The School of the Arts and the Department of History are co-sponsoring Cohen’s lecture, which is free and open to the public. A reception follows in Trinity 100.