History Commons^™

Making Marital Rape Visible: A History Of American Legal And Social Movements Criminalizing Rape In Marriage, Joann M. Ross

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines the history of marital rape and related topics in the United States within the broader context of women’s legal and political rights. The project demonstrates the interplay between women’s activists, legislators, the criminal justice system, and an involved public necessary to change both societal and legal views on spousal rape, and eventually its criminalization in all fifty states.

Concentrating on approaches to criminalizing marital rape in three of the fifty states, this dissertation provides a reasonable representation of the existence of the marital rape exemption in America, arguments used to maintain the exemption, and various methods used …

Philanthropy And The New England Emigrant Aid Company, 1854-1900, Courtney Elizabeth Buchkoski

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This project examines the New England Emigrant Aid Company colonization of Kansas in 1854 as a solution to the growing debate over popular sovereignty and slave labor. It uses the Company as a lens to reinterpret the intellectual history of philanthropy, tracing its roots from Puritan ideas of charity to the capitalistic giving of the nineteenth century.

It argues that the Company’s vision was simultaneously capitalistic and moralistic, for it served both as an imposition of “proper” society upon the West and South, but also had the potential to benefit the donors financially and politically. Using a settler colonial framework, …

From England's Bridewell To America's Brides: Imprisoned Women, Shakespeare's Measure For Measure, And Empire, Alicia Meyer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the experience of largely single women in London’s house of correction, Bridewell Prison, and argues that Bridewell’s prisoners, and the nature of their crimes, reveal the state’s desire for dependent, sexually controlled, yet ultimately productive women. Scholars have largely neglected the place of early modern women’s imprisonment despite its pervasive presence in the everyday lives of common English women. By examining the historical and cultural implications of early modern women and prison, this thesis contends that women’s prisons were more than simply establishments of punishment and reform. A closer examination of Bridewell’s philosophy and practices shows how …