Kelly A. Ryan is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University Southeast.

"Kelly A. Ryan has expertly crafted a history of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Massachusetts that is fully intersectional in its understanding of how hierarchies of gender, race, class, and age created an enduring system of white male dominance. Regulating Passion is also innovative for noting the ways in which white men's and women's participation in the American Revolution was not only gendered but highly sexualized...[and] is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on the history of sexuality....It is an approach to be emulated."--Journal of the Early Republic

"Ryan's work has many strengths, most notably her ability to analyze differences of race, class, gender, and age without losing sight of her broad interpretation of shifts in sexual regulation from the late colonial to the early national period. Moreover, her ability to address both changes in sexual regulation and continuities in patriarchal power is important and necessary in conveying the complexity and sources of white men's authority. She emphasizes the constancy of white men's patriarchal power during this period while still revealing the challenges posed by individuals, groups, and new ideological trends. By highlighting these challenges, Ryan is able to expose the ways in which patriarchal authority shifted and transformed to meet these pressures. Ultimately, she reveals the resilience at the heart of enduring systems of power..."--Commonplace

"Regulating Passion offers a compelling and creative answer to the longstanding question: how did the Revolution change American society? In this skillfully crafted narrative, Kelly A. Ryan investigates how men and women--both white and people of color--struggled to locate freedom and equality in the early republic. Regulating Passion adds a refreshingly new dimension to the literature of race and gender in Revolutionary America by viewing the fight against patriarchy through the lens of sexuality. Based on detailed archival research, Regulating Passion sparkles with fascinating stories of youthful fornicators, defiant Native Americans, and nervous founding fathers. Students and general readers alike will be impressed by this book's breathtaking scope and its bold assertions of how the American Revolution shaped the politics of race, gender, and sexuality that we recognize today."--John Gilbert McCurdy, author of Citizen Bachelors

"Kelly A. Ryan has produced a thoroughly researched analysis of the history of sexuality and patriarchy in Massachusetts over the long eighteenth century...Regulating Passion offers readers a useful case study that affirms the consensus of historians of sexuality in early America that continuity is more powerful than change in the Revolutionary era, and that Anglo-American patriarchy reinvented itself in order to continue privileging white men's interests amid the social upheavals of warfare and political independence. Ryan's synthesis of a generation of scholarship on the history of sexuality will be of particular interest to non-specialists in the history of sexuality and graduate students."--Ann M. Little, Journal of Eighteenth Century Studies

"In her welcome contribution to the developing historiography investigating the American Revolution's impact on sexual culture, Kelly A. Ryan sounds a cautionary note. In contrast to scholars who have claimed that a sexual revolution took place during the late eighteenth century, Ryan argues that patriarchy remained a powerful force regulating the sexual behavior of white women and non-white women and men well into the nineteenth century...Overall, she claims, the changes that resulted from the Revolution were more in style than in content, as legal control shifted to social control, but left hierarchies intact."--Rachel Hope Cleves, The New England Quarterly

"Ryan's intersectional analysis...distinguishes Regulating Passion...Ryan argues that the official mechanisms of sexual regulation policies women's sexuality in racialized ways while gradually excusing white men from sexual oversight...By refusing to bring complaints against women of color, Massachusetts instantiated a racialized double-standard."--April Haynes, Early American Literature