Abstract
With Founding Friendships, Cassandra Good joins the ranks of such scholars as Fredrika Teute, Catherine Allgor, Richard Godbeer, and Lorri Glover, who have analyzed the private worlds of the founding generation in order to recapture and reconfi gure the connections between their experiences as wives, salonnières, fathers, sons, brothers, or friends, and the political realms within which they moved. Through a series of thematic chapters analyzing private letters, novels, advice books, and friendship albums, along with social ideals and gift-giving practices, Good considers the phenomenon of nonsexual, cross-sex friendships between educated elite white women and men in the early years of the republic. Acknowledging that most advice writers cautioned strongly against mixed-sex friendships—there was the ever-present danger of the “seduction of women by men who pretended to be their friends”—Good asks readers to look beyond published literary representations to examine how individuals shaped their feelings in diaries and letters, and to enter the spaces where they created platonic relationships: churches, literary and other circles, and the homes of married friends and fictive kin (46). This extensively researched, thoughtful book will rest comfortably on the shelf with its compatriots.