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Full-Text Articles in Women's History

Flora's Fourth Child: Race, Gender, And Botany In The British Colonial Caribbean, Brittany L. Mondragon May 2022

Flora's Fourth Child: Race, Gender, And Botany In The British Colonial Caribbean, Brittany L. Mondragon

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In 1824, an enslaved woman named Catalina (alias Susannah Mathison) induced an abortion by drinking an herbal mixture on the Castle Wemyss Estate in Jamaica. Consequently, the estate’s attorney denounced her as an African witchcraft practitioner. Many enslaved women faced similar convictions for their botanical knowledge as British colonists misinterpreted Obeah for witchcraft or superstition. This thesis sheds light on these women’s experiences and examines how the British Empire imposed imperial rule over enslaved women by reflecting on the intersectionality of race, gender, and botany. Focusing on the Greater Caribbean area and centering primarily around Jamaica, this research explores the …


The Ill-Treatment Of Their Countrywoman: Liberated African Women, Violence, And Power In Tortola, 1807–1834, Arianna Browne Jun 2021

The Ill-Treatment Of Their Countrywoman: Liberated African Women, Violence, And Power In Tortola, 1807–1834, Arianna Browne

Master's Theses

In 1807, Parliament passed an Act to abolish the slave trade, leading to the Royal Navy’s campaign of policing international waters and seizing ships suspected of illegal trading. As the Royal Navy captured slave ships as prizes of war and condemned enslaved Africans to Vice-Admiralty courts, formerly enslaved Africans became “captured negroes” or “liberated Africans,” making the subjects in the British colonies. This work, which takes a microhistorical approach to investigate the everyday experiences of liberated Africans in Tortola during the early nineteenth century, focuses on the violent conditions of liberated African women, demonstrating that abolition consisted of violent contradictions …


Southern Veils : The Sisters Of Loretto In Early National Kentucky., Hannah O'Daniel Dec 2017

Southern Veils : The Sisters Of Loretto In Early National Kentucky., Hannah O'Daniel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the experiences of Roman Catholic women who joined the Sisters of Loretto, a community of women religious in rural Washington and Nelson Counties, Kentucky, between the 1790s and 1826. It argues that the Sisters of Loretto used faith to interpret and respond to unfolding events in the early nation. The women sought to combat moral slippage and restore providential favor in the face of local Catholic institutional instability, global Protestant evangelical movements, war and economic crisis, and a tuberculosis outbreak. The Lorettines faced financial, social, and cultural pressures—including an economic depression, a culture that celebrated family formation …


The Ideal And The Real: Southern Plantation Women Of The Civil War, Kelly H. Crosby Oct 2014

The Ideal And The Real: Southern Plantation Women Of The Civil War, Kelly H. Crosby

Student Publications

Southern plantation women experienced a shift in identity over the course of the Civil War. Through the diaries of Catherine Edmondston and Eliza Fain, historians note the discrepancy between the ideal and real roles women had while the men were off fighting. Unique perspectives and hidden voices in their writings offer valuable insight into the life of plantation women and the hybrid identity they gained despite the Confederate loss.


"Spectacular Opacities": The Hyers Sisters' Performances Of Respectability And Resistance, Jocelyn Buckner Jan 2012

"Spectacular Opacities": The Hyers Sisters' Performances Of Respectability And Resistance, Jocelyn Buckner

Theatre Faculty Articles and Research

This essay analyzes the Hyers Sisters, a Reconstruction-era African American sister act, and their radical efforts to transcend social limits of gender, class, and race in their early concert careers and three major productions, Out of Bondage and Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad, two slavery-to-freedom epics, and Urlina, the African Princess, the first known African American play set in Africa. At a time when serious, realistic roles and romantic plotlines featuring black actors were nearly nonexistent due to the country’s appetite for stereotypical caricatures, the Hyers Sisters used gender passing to perform opposite one another as heterosexual lovers in …


Piracy, Slavery, And Assimilation: Women In Early Modern Captivity Literature, David C. Moberly Apr 2011

Piracy, Slavery, And Assimilation: Women In Early Modern Captivity Literature, David C. Moberly

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines a hitherto neglected body of works featuring female characters enslaved in Islamicate lands. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Englishmen and women were taken captive by pirates and enslaved in what is now the Middle East and North Africa. Several writers of the time created narratives and dramas about the experiences of such captives. Recent scholarship has brought to light many of these works and pointed out their importance in establishing what was still a young, unsure, and developing English identity in this early period. Most of this scholarship, however, has dealt with narratives of the …


Receipt For Sale Of Permelia, A Woman. January 24, 1859., A. M. Holland, John Susan Jan 1859

Receipt For Sale Of Permelia, A Woman. January 24, 1859., A. M. Holland, John Susan

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

Receipt "for a Negro Woman named Permelia," 21, from John Susan (name unclear) to A.M. Holland for "eleven hundred dollars" ($1100 USD), January 24, 1859. Location not stated.


Deed Of Sale For Seven People (As Slaves) Sold By William O'Neale To John Henry Eaton, Washington, D.C., April 10, 1823., William O'Neale, John Henry Eaton Apr 1823

Deed Of Sale For Seven People (As Slaves) Sold By William O'Neale To John Henry Eaton, Washington, D.C., April 10, 1823., William O'Neale, John Henry Eaton

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

This deed or receipt acknowledges the exchange of $800 for seven slaves: Betsy Baker, 55; Nelly, 36 and her son Jim, 12 and daughter Jane, 7; Henney, 40, and her son Washington, 5; and Polly Quander, 21.