Fall 2014

• Katharine Park, Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University
• Joel Kaye, Professor of History, Barnard College
• Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History, Columbia University

Thomas Laqueur’s important book, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), is almost twenty-five years old, and his governing narrative, that the late eighteenth century saw a shift from a “one-sex” to a “two-sex” body in Western society, has gained broad acceptance among modern historians and scholars in literary and cultural studies. At the same time, it has come under increasing attack by historians of ancient, medieval, and early modern law and medicine. “Rethinking the ‘One-Sex’ Body” brings together this new research to ask if Laqueur is wrong, and, if so, how he’s wrong and what difference it makes.