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Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Purdue University

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The Law And The Lady: Consent And Marriage In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Heather Lea Nelson Apr 2015

The Law And The Lady: Consent And Marriage In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Heather Lea Nelson

Open Access Dissertations

While many scholars have written on women and marriage in nineteenth-century British history and fiction, this dissertation, The Law and the Lady: Consent and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, is the first to apply consent theory to those unions. Modern consent theory dictates that for individuals to consent, they must be autonomous, capable, educated, mature, and volunteering, and they must express consent with opportunities to retract those expressions. This dissertation asserts that because nineteenth-century British women usually lacked these components, their marital consent was partial, illegitimate, or absent. Fiction frequently equivocated about this social problem of contemporary female marital consent. …


Family, Property, And Negotiations Of Authority: Francoise Brulart And The Estate Management Of Noble Women In Early Modern Burgundy, Amy Kathleen Rogers Dean Jul 2014

Family, Property, And Negotiations Of Authority: Francoise Brulart And The Estate Management Of Noble Women In Early Modern Burgundy, Amy Kathleen Rogers Dean

Open Access Dissertations

There is no question that early modern France was a patriarchal society. In fact, during this period, there was an increase in legislation further subordinating women under the authority of their fathers and then of their husbands. The legal identities of women as daughters and wives was officially negligible. However, this dissertation argues that in practice, family needs trumped the constricting legal prescriptions placed upon women. In examining the estate accounts, contracts, and family papers of the Saulx-Tavanes, Brulart, Le Goux, Joly, Marmier, and Baissey families, it is abundantly clear that women of both the noblesse de robe and noblesse …