Cassandra A. Good. Founding Friendships

The history of friendship is squidgy territory. The word lacks definition now, and as Cassandra A. Good’s noteworthy new monograph Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic reveals, the word lacked definition in the early national past as well. Historians of same-sex sexuality have long looked to friendship as a site for expression of queer desires because the line between Eros and amity could be so blurry. That blurriness proves to have afflicted opposite-sex friendship as well, the focus of Good’s work. However, Good argues, rescuing the history of female-male friendships from the shadow of romantic love or lust matters because it illuminates an important stage on which the women and men of the early republic worked out new, more egalitarian, gender relations that gave women increased access to the nation’s political life. Founding Friendships tackles the problem of definitions in its opening pages. Friendships, according to Good, were affectionate, reciprocal relationships that the participants themselves described by this word. Class and race also played central roles in structuring the relationships under question. The bonds that Good seeks to historicize were those shared by white elites with access to the writing and reading materials that provide the book with much of its source base. Illiterate, lower-class, and enslaved men and women may also have formed friendships in the postrevolutionary period, but their stories fall outside the bounds of this study.

Friendship · Human sexuality · Masculinity · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Romance · Shadow (psychology) · Sociology · European Political History Analysis · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies