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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
“She’S Been Her Own Mistress...”: The Long History Of Charlotte Dupee V. Henry Clay, 1790-1830, William Kelly
“She’S Been Her Own Mistress...”: The Long History Of Charlotte Dupee V. Henry Clay, 1790-1830, William Kelly
Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
In February 1829, Charlotte Dupee, an enslaved woman, sued for her freedom in the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia. The defendant was her enslaver, United States Secretary of State Henry Clay. Situating her as the main historical actor, this research illustrates how Dupee’s life experiences as an enslaved woman directly informed the decisive timing of her freedom suit. By expanding Dupee’s story beyond 1829 to reconstruct her life from girlhood to manumission, we also gain a greater understanding of the nuanced and precarious nature of alternative pathways to freedom.
Death Became Them: The Defeminization Of The American Death Culture, 1609-1899, Briony D. Zlomke
Death Became Them: The Defeminization Of The American Death Culture, 1609-1899, Briony D. Zlomke
Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Focusing specifically on the years 1609 to 1899 in the United States, this thesis examines how middle-class women initially controlled the economy of preparing the dead in pre-industrialized America and lost their positions as death transitioned from a community-based event to an occurrence from which one could profit. In this new economy, men dominated the capitalist-driven funeral parlors and undertaker services. The changing ideology about white middle-class women’s proper places in society and the displacement of women in the “death trade” with the advent of the funeral director exacerbated this decline of a once female-defined practice. These changes dramatically altered …
Proper Women/Propertied Women: Federal Land Laws And Gender Order(S) In The Nineteenth-Century Imperial American West, Tonia M. Compton
Proper Women/Propertied Women: Federal Land Laws And Gender Order(S) In The Nineteenth-Century Imperial American West, Tonia M. Compton
Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
This study explores the relationship between federal land policy and women’s property rights in the nineteenth-century American West, analyzing women’s responses to expanded property rights under the 1850 Oregon Donation Act, the Homestead Act of 1862, and the 1887 General Allotment Act, and the ways in which the demands of empire building shaped legislators’ decisions to grant such rights to women. These laws addressed women’s property rights only in relation to their marital status, and solely because women figured prominently in the national project of westward expansion. Women utilized these property rights to both engage in the process of empire …