You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

Hello, and welcome to Ben Franklin's World Revisited,

a series of classic episodes that bring fresh perspective to our latest episodes

and add deeper connections to our understanding

of early American history. And I'm your host, Liz Covart. In our most recent episode, episode

410, historian Mary Beth Norton guided us through the letters and advice columns of the Athenian

Mercury, which offered us a unique window into the personal questions, emotional dilemmas, and social

expectations that shape love and marriage in 1690s England. Today, we're extending that

conversation by revisiting episode 94 and our exploration of cross-sex friendships in the early

American Republic, because even his attitudes towards intimacy, intellect, and

gender roles changed over time, people remain deeply curious about what relationships between men and

women could or should look like. So what did friendships between men and women look like in the

decades after the American Revolution? Could emotional closeness and intellectual

kinship exist outside of a marriage? And how did early Americans navigate the social risks

and rewards of those ties? To help us answer those questions, we'll return to Cassandra Good,

author of Founding Friendships, Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic.

Now, during our chat, Cassie reveals why cross-sex friendships were both common and controversial

in the post-revolutionary United States, the emotional, intellectual, and political roles that

these friendships played for both men and women,

and how such relationships provided rare opportunities for gender equality within a society still governed by legal covature and strict etiquette.

Now, if you enjoyed our discussion with Mary Beth Norton about anonymous advice and emotional

life in the 1690s, then you'll find this conversation offers a fascinating

...