Why am I passionate about this?

Like most people, I find the history of sex and everything associated with it fascinating! It’s often been difficult to document and interpret the complexities about heterosexuality, gender identity, and same-sex desire as well as women’s reproductive health which is intimately (although not exclusively of course) linked to sex. We are in a golden age of fantastic work on so many aspects of the history of sex. Apart from the intrinsic interest of these books, I think they provide such an important context for our very lively and often very intense contemporary legal, political, and cultural debates over sex in all its forms.


I wrote

Book cover of Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789

What is my book about?

Our ideas about the long histories of young couples' relationships and women's efforts to manage their reproductive health are often…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance

Julie Hardwick Why did I love this book?

We might think that ideas about nonbinary gender identifications are a recent phenomenon, but Lead Devun does an amazing job of exploring the deep history of this kind of sexuality between the fifth and fifteenth centuries in Europe. Just as our society now finds embracing non-binary gender identification challenging at times, Devun shows how attitudes towards and practices of nonbinary sexuality changed dramatically over the course of the medieval millennium.

By Leah Devun,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Shape of Sex as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, focusing on ideas and individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories from 200-1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, Leah DeVun reveals how and why efforts to define "the human" so often hinged on ideas about nonbinary sex.

The Shape of Sex examines a host of thinkers-theologians, cartographers, natural philosophers, lawyers, poets, surgeons, and alchemists-who used ideas about nonbinary sex as conceptual tools to order their political, cultural, and natural worlds. DeVun reconstructs the cultural landscape navigated by individuals whose sex or gender…


Book cover of Abortion in Early Modern Italy

Julie Hardwick Why did I love this book?

Who would have thought Catholic Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have tolerated widespread abortion? John Christopoulos brilliantly shows that, despite the moral proscription and legal prohibition of abortion from church and state leadership, women across the social spectrum from elites to peasants practiced abortion with the tacit or explicit support of key people in their communities. Compelling mini-narratives about individual women’s abortion stories are interwoven with an expert analysis of the legal, religious, and scientific knowledge and attitudes.

By John Christopoulos,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Abortion in Early Modern Italy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A comprehensive history of abortion in Renaissance Italy.

In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. His poignant portraits of women who terminated or were forced to terminate pregnancies offer a corrective to longstanding views: he finds that Italians maintained a fundamental ambivalence about abortion. Italians from all levels of society sought, had, and participated in abortions. Early modern Italy was not an absolute anti-abortion culture, an exemplary Catholic society centered on the "traditional family." Rather, Christopoulos shows, Italians held many views on abortion, and their responses to its…


Book cover of True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Julie Hardwick Why did I love this book?

True Sex is one of the most timely history books I have ever read. Driving across rural America today, I wonder about the lives of trans men (and women) that Emily Skidmore so brilliantly recovered. In her emphasis on how unexceptional they were, she provides such a vital context for understanding the emerging visibility and claims of trans men and women today.

By Emily Skidmore,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked True Sex as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner, 2018 U.S. History PROSE Award
The incredible stories of how trans men assimilated into mainstream communities in the late 1800s
In 1883, Frank Dubois gained national attention for his life in Waupun, Wisconsin. There he was known as a hard-working man, married to a young woman named Gertrude Fuller. What drew national attention to his seemingly unremarkable life was that he was revealed to be anatomically female. Dubois fit so well within the small community that the townspeople only discovered his "true sex" when his former husband and their two children arrived in the town searching in desperation for…


Book cover of Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940

Julie Hardwick Why did I love this book?

Move over New York and Providence, Julio Capó illuminates in this dazzling book about queer life in Miami before World War II how an important early twentieth-century gay community emerged at the intersection of tourism, migration, and trade around the Caribbean. He not only provides a fascinating account of gay Miami but uses that community to tell a wider story about the history of the region.

By Julio Capó,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Welcome to Fairyland as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Poised on the edge of the United States and at the center of a wider Caribbean world, today's Miami is marketed as an international tourist hub that embraces gender and sexual difference. As Julio Capo Jr. shows in this fascinating history, Miami's transnational connections reveal that the city has been a queer borderland for over a century. In chronicling Miami's queer past from its 1896 founding through World War II, Capo shows the multifaceted ways gender and sexual renegades made the city their own.

Drawing from a multilingual archive, Capo unearths the forgotten history of ""fairyland,"" a marketing term crafted…


Book cover of Her Neighbor's Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage

Julie Hardwick Why did I love this book?

In contrast to stereotypes about lesbians that framed them as bra-burning, men-hating, hairy-legged feminists, Lauren Gutterman evocatively shows how the emergence of post-World War II lesbian desire took place at the center of American life, in the suburbs, often in marriages to men and heterosexual families with children. Married women rejected divorce or labelling themselves as lesbians even while they had affairs with their female neighbors. Her Neighbor’s Wife offers an extraordinary new interpretation of how post-World War II American marriages could accommodate women’s relationships with other women.

By Lauren Jae Gutterman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Her Neighbor's Wife as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

At first glance, Barbara Kalish fit the stereotype of a 1950s wife and mother. Married at eighteen, Barbara lived with her husband and two daughters in a California suburb, where she was president of the Parent-Teacher Association. At a PTA training conference in San Francisco, Barbara met Pearl, another PTA president who also had two children and happened to live only a few blocks away from her. To Barbara, Pearl was "the most gorgeous woman in the world," and the two began an affair that lasted over a decade.
Through interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters, Her Neighbor's Wife traces the…


Explore my book 😀

Book cover of Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789

What is my book about?

Our ideas about the long histories of young couples' relationships and women's efforts to manage their reproductive health are often premised on the notion of a powerful sexual double standard. Yet in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France, young workers had the freedom to experiment with intimacy as part of courtships, they routinely had sex before marriage, and their communities were quick to support young women whose beaus refused to marry them when they became pregnant. Young couples were sometimes not ready to get married when they became pregnant. They tried a wide variety of ways to interrupt reproduction, or in our terms to get an abortion, or to move the baby off the scene after its birth.

The voices, pleasures, perils, and reproductive challenges of young couples are vividly captured. Local courts, Catholic clergy, and neighbors, kin, and co-workers all pragmatically supported young couples in these relationship and reproductive struggles.

Book cover of The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance
Book cover of Abortion in Early Modern Italy
Book cover of True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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Book cover of Knife Skills

Wendy Church Author Of Knife Skills

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Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a thrill seeker when it comes to reading, and I want to be so immersed in a story that I have to read it in one sitting and then can be completely taken by surprise by a plot twist. It was extremely hard to pick only five titles, so to narrow it down, I 1) made an attempt to pick from a few different sub-genres and, 2) stipulated that Agatha Christie could populate the entire list. All of these titles blend wonderful writing with great twists, and I hope you enjoy them. I did my best to avoid spoilers in the descriptions, although by being on this list, it’s a little bit of a spoiler…

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What is my book about?

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Sagarine Pfister is a great cook but has been blacklisted by almost every restaurant in Chicago. She gets her chance at Louie's, a below-average restaurant, the only place that will give her a job. Things change when she finds head chef Louie Ferrar dead in the walk-in freezer of his restaurant. But instead of closing the place down, the owner, Russian gang boss Anatoly Morozov, offers not only her Louie's job but…

Knife Skills

By Wendy Church,

What is this book about?

"Dizzying . . . Audiences who wished the TV series The Bear had made room for Russian mobsters are in for a treat" Kirkus Reviews Starred Review

Sagarine Pfister is a great cook but has been blacklisted by almost every restaurant in Chicago. She gets her chance at Louie's, a below-average restaurant, the only place that will give her a job.

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