Title: Sex and the Founding Fathers - The American Quest for a Relatable Past 
Author: Thomas A. Foster
Category: Academic/Sexuality/History/Cultural Studies
Series: Sexuality Studies
Publisher: Temple University Press (February 17, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1439911029
ISBN-13: 978-1439911020

Promotional info/Publisher's summary - "Biographers, journalists, and satirists have long used the subject of sex to define the masculine character and political authority of America's Founding Fathers. Tracing these commentaries on the Revolutionary Era's major political figures in Sex and the Founding Fathers, Thomas Foster shows how continual attempts to reveal the true character of these men instead exposes much more about Americans and American culture than about the Founders themselves. 

Sex and the Founding Fathers examines the remarkable and varied assessments of the intimate lives of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris from their own time to ours. Interpretations can change radically; consider how Jefferson has been variously idealized as a chaste widower, condemned as a child molester, and recently celebrated as a multicultural hero. 

Foster considers the public and private images of these generally romanticized leaders to show how each generation uses them to reshape and reinforce American civic and national identity. "

Reviews:
"In this concise, engaging book, Foster (Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man) explores the intimate lives of six Founding Fathers, and, more importantly, the way their sex lives have been presented and analyzed over the years. Focusing on George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and the oft-forgotten Gouverneur Morris, Foster deftly demonstrates the ways these men’s private lives have been essentially rewritten to present the normative, virtuous, and manly Founders Americans choose to believe in. Drawing primarily from popular biographies, from the colonial era through present day, the book explores the ways biographers present their subjects in response to the times: strict Victorian morals, Freudian psychoanalysis, and contemporary attempts to embrace, rather than hide, all aspects of their lives. Foster addresses the glossing over of Washington’s lack of children (perhaps he was sterile, but god forbid he was impotent), the refashioning of Franklin’s Parisian affairs as the “harmless” pleasures of a “foxy grandpa,” and the romanticized marriage of John and Abigail Adams—the “Romeo and Juliet of the American Revolution”. Proving that you can’t trust biographers, Foster ably reveals that sex has always factored into national identity and that the Founders were flesh-and-blood men, unable to support idealistic American standards of morality." -Publishers Weekly

"Sex and the Founding Fathers is a must read for all who are interested in the founding era and the historiography of the period." -Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

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