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Lynn Sacco

See Also: Curriculum Vitae

Field Specialties

Gender and Sexuality; Gilded Age and Progressive Era social and cultural history; U.S. Women's History; History of Medicine

I am interested in the struggle to reconcile the contradictions between what we observe and what we believe. My research and teaching interests include the history of American women; sexuality and gender; medicine. law, and public policy; popular culture; and nineteenth century and twentieth-century U.S. history.

IMy book, Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History, will be published in 2009 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.* The book uses sources from medicine, law, social reform, and popular culture to document both the occurrence of incest and the noisy silence around the subject. Focusing on discourses about the etiology of gonorrhea in girls, my book argues that as scientific breakthroughs in the 1890s improved doctors' ability to detect the disease, their social biases diminished their ability to see the obvious evidence before them. When they discovered evidence that gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease, was "epidemic" among all classes of girls--not just girls from socially marginalized families--health care professionals and reformers revised their views about gonorrhea, not incest.

I practiced law for fifteen years in Chicago and am a member of the Illinois Bar.

Education

  • Ph.D., University of Southern California; 2001

Selected Publications

  • "Venereal Disease." In Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, edited by Paula S. Fass. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2003

  • "Sanitized For Your Protection: Medical Discourse and the Denial of Incest in the United States, 1890-1940." Journal of Women's History 14 (autumn 2002): 80

  • "If We're So Smart, Why Are We Still in School?" American Studies Association Newsletter 23 (March 2000): 1

Selected Awards

  • University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow, Women's Studies Program, UC Santa Barbara, 2001 - 2003
  • Judith Lee Ridge Article Prize, Western Association of Women Historians, 2003
  • Woodrow Wilson-Johnson & Johnson Dissertation Grant in Women's Health, 1999
Lynn Sacco

Contact Information

Lynn Sacco
Assistant Professor of History
915 Volunteer Boulevard
6th Floor, Dunford Hall
Knoxville, TN 37996-4065

Office: (865) 974-7092
Fax: (865) 974-3915
E-mail: lsacco@utk.edu