Welcome
Rebecca Davis is a historian of twentieth-century American religion, sexuality, and culture. Her first book, MORE PERFECT UNIONS: THE AMERICAN SEARCH FOR MARITAL BLISS, explores the history of marriage counseling in the United States -- and helps explain both why Americans remain so uniquely obsessed with the pursuit of marital perfection and what that preoccupation means for the culture as a whole. She has a special interest in American religious history and often teaches courses on immigration, race, and ethnicity. In 2017 she became a producer and story editor for Sexing History, a podcast.
She is currently writing a book about how religious conversion exposed contentious ideas about the nature of the self and how much it could change in the postwar United States.
Recent Work
Hear Rebecca discuss how conservative evangelical marital advice guides of the 1970s, like Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman, viewed the sexual politics of the changing American workplace.
Rebecca describes some of her research finds at the University of Notre Dame from May 2017 as a recipient of a Cushwa Center travel grant.
More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss
"[T]his book is a must-read for scholars in women's history and gender studies." -- Norma Basch, Journal of American History
"There could hardly be a more opportune time to have at hand Rebecca Davis's smart, thoughtful, and meticulously-researched new book of social history." -- Bella DePaulo, Living Single blog, PsychologyToday.com