Women's History Commons^™

"The Best Interests Of The Child:" Parental Claims In Nebraska Child Custody Cases, 1877 1924, Esme Krohn

Digital Legal Research Lab

No abstract provided.

Habeas At Home And Heart: Progressive Era Cases Of Spousal Confinement To Nebraska's Psychiatric Households, Isabelle Childs

Digital Legal Research Lab

No abstract provided.

One Among Many: Charlotte Kolmitz,Assistant U.S. Attorney In Seattle, 1918 -1925, Anna Synya

Digital Legal Research Lab

No abstract provided.

The Making Of Everyday Hollywood: 1930s Film Influence On Everyday Women’S Fashion In Nebraska, Anna Naomi Kuhlman

Department of Textiles, Merchandising, and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This research examines the influence of film fashions on middle-class, Nebraskan women’s dress during the Great Depression (1932-1940). The Great Depression challenged the middle class: while standards of living remained high, the economic means to achieve those standards diminished. Despite the crisis, women strove to keep up with current fashion trends. While previous literature has examined how Hollywood directly affected trends and styles of the 1930s in major American metropolitan contexts, the manifestation of trends in the dress of middle to lower socio-economic classes in Middle America remains under-examined. Against the backdrop of Depression-era hardships specific to Nebraska’s agricultural economy, …

Hospital Sketches, Louisa May Alcott

Zea E-Books in American Studies

In November 1862, Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) signed up as a volunteer nurse for the Sanitary Commission charged with caring for the Civil War’s mounting casualties. From 13 December 1862 until 21 January 1863, Miss Alcott served at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown in the District of Columbia, where she ultimately contracted typhoid and pneumonia and very nearly died. This book is her account of her journey south from Concord and her six weeks in the nation’s wartime capital. Styling herself by the fanciful name “Tribulation Periwinkle,” she brought humor as well as pathos to her subject, making this …

Sentiment Analysis Of William Cranch's Petitions For Freedom Court Reports Using Python And Vader., Anna Krause

UCARE Research Products

Text analysis from William Cranch's court reports on the 19th Century African American Petitions for Freedom. Cranch provided selected court reports and their full title, date, and document text was imported to a csv file. This data was then analyzed using Python and its multiple software libraries to clean and prepare the text. The VADER(Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) package was utilized to give a sentiment score to each body of text, then was compared and visualized with the entire corpus. Results showed that most court reports carried a high rate of positive sentiment.

Winnebago Nation Of Nebraska Response Patterns, 1865-1911: A Gendered & Generational Analysis, Ashley Morrison

Honors Theses

During the era of federal assimilation policy, the Winnebago people asserted their cultural identity and history at every step of allotment and boarding school policy. From their distinct responses, Winnebago men and women defended their autonomy and sovereignty to federal intervention. By examining their unique opinions, a more cumulative understanding of the various tactics the Winnebago people used can be further explored. Gender, education, and generation shaped individual responses. Through demanding an inclusion of women in allotting land to taking children away from the Winnebago Industrial School, the Winnebago people resisted against the paternalistic control of the United States. These …

Abortion, Homosexuality, And Fiscal Conservatism: The Coalescence Of The New Right Around A Partisan Sex Education, Sheridan Macy

Honors Theses

A new movement surrounding the implementation of sex education, including programs aimed at youth with the goals of destigmatization of sex, preventing teen pregnancy, and venereal disease began in the 1960s. This launched a debate about what information should be available about sex and sexuality and to whom. Initial debates at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s focused on whether or not sex education should be included in schools at all, however, by the mid-1970s and early 1980s, the debate had moved on to what specifically these courses should cover. Born in 1964 and liberalized in …

A Tale Of Two Sisters: Family Histories From The Strait Salish Borderlands, Katrina Jagodinsky

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Based on legal and genealogical records, this microhistory chronicles the difficult choices between whiteness and Indianness made by two Salish sisters and their biracial children in order to maintain their kinship networks throughout the Salish Sea borderlands between 1865 and 1919. While some of these choices obscured individual family members from historical records, reading their lives in tandem with other family members’ histories reveals remarkable persistence in the midst of dramatic racial and political transformation. Focused primarily on San Juan Island residents, this article suggests that indigenous and interracial family histories of the Pacific Northwest and other borderland regions in …

Review Of A Generation Removed: The Fostering And Adoption Of Indigenous Children In The Postwar World, By Margaret Jacobs, Catherine E. Rymph

Department of History: Faculty Publications

The story of indigenous child removal is a devastating one. The well-known Indian boarding schools of the late nineteenth century United States separated children from their families, communities, language, and culture and thus served as a radical assimilation project. Less familiar may be the ongoing removal of native children from their families deep into the twentieth century. In this fascinating book, Jacobs shows how post–World War II policy changes that scaled back governments’ existing obligations to indigenous peoples coincided with “purportedly color-blind liberalism” in the United States, Canada, and Australia to make indigenous placement in nonindigenous homes seem not only …

Review Of A Generation Removed: The Fostering And Adoption Of Indigenous Children In The Postwar World. By Margaret D. Jacobs, Catherine E. Rymph

Department of History: Faculty Publications

The story of indigenous child removal is a devastating one. The well-known Indian boarding schools of the late nineteenth century United States separated children from their families, communities, language, and culture and thus served as a radical assimilation project. Less familiar may be the ongoing removal of native children from their families deep into the twentieth century. In this fascinating book, Jacobs shows how post–World War II policy changes that scaled back governments’ existing obligations to indigenous peoples coincided with “purportedly color-blind liberalism” in the United States, Canada, and Australia to make indigenous placement in nonindigenous homes seem not only …

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, …

Freedom Indivisible: Gays And Lesbians In The African American Civil Rights Movement, Jared E. Leighton

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This work documents the role of sixty gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals in the African American civil rights movement in the pre-Stonewall era. It examines the extent of their involvement from the grassroots to the highest echelons of leadership. Because many lesbians and gays were not out during their time in the movement, and in some cases had not yet identified as lesbian or gay, this work also analyzes how the civil rights movement, and in a number of cases women’s liberation, contributed to their identity formation and coming out. This work also contributes to our understanding of opposition to …

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 …

"In Family Way": Guarding Indigenous Women’S Children In Washington Territory, Katrina Jagodinsky

Department of History: Faculty Publications

The cases discussed here represent very few of the guardianship arrangements that characterized intergenerational and interracial households in territorial Washington, yet the patterns they illustrate correspond with other evidence that allows historians to track the distribution of Indian and mixed- race children in the Puget Sound region. Th e 1880 federal census schedules for counties bordering the Puget Sound reveals the informal guardianship of Native women’s children in ninetytwo households. Among these extralegal arrangements were forty- two households headed by white men, some single like Ed Boggess and others married to white women like Phoebe Judson, who classified the indigenous …

From Periodical To Book In Her Early Career: E. D. E. N. Southworth’S Letters To Abraham Hart, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

E.D.E.N. Southworth's correspondence with Henry Peterson of the Saturday Evening Post and Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger, both of whom serialized her novels in their weekly story papers, is sometimes dramatic and emotional. In September 1849 Peterson chided Southworth for a “capital literary error” in an installment of her novel The Deserted Wife, in which the Reverend Withers uses his patriarchal authority to maneuver the young, unwilling Sophie Churchill into marriage. The incident would make readers “thro[w] down the tale in disgust,” he warns, and he omitted it from the serialization. In December 1854 he raised …

Introduction To E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering A Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, Melissa J. Homestead, Pamela T. Washington

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In early 1901, Willa Cather visited Prospect Cottage in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the longtime home of the recently deceased novelist Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevirte (E. D. E. N.) Southworth. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1819 to southern parents (her father from Virginia, her mother from Maryland), Southworth lived in Washington with her family until she married Frederick Hamilton Southworth and moved with him to Wisconsin in 1841. When he deserted her and their two children,' she returned to Washington and taught school to support herself, running to writing to supplement her income from teaching. Within a few …

A Chronological Bibliography Of E. D. E. N. Southworth's Works Privileging Periodical Publication, Melissa J. Homestead, Vicki L. Martin

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Previous attempts at a comprehensive bibliography of E. D. E. N. Southworth's fiction have organized her works alphabetically by book title or chronologically by book publication date. Serialization information--if included at all--is subordinated to book entries or listed separately. These bibliographic conventions better suit authors who published fewer novels than Southworth did and/or did \ not routinely serialize their works. As a result, earlier bibliographies have caused confusion about the size and chronology of Southworth's body of work. Adding to the confusion, her book publisher T. B. Peterson arbitrarily broke many of her novels that appeared in serial form under …

Review Of Sex, Murder, And The Unwritten Law: Courting Judicial Mayhem, Texas Style. By Bill Neal., Paul N. Spellman

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

"If, as has often been contended, truth is the first casualty of traditional warfare, then logic, it appears, is the first casualty of sexual warfare." And with that thematic statement in hand, author Bill Neal is off to the proverbial races with an often delightful, sometimes troubling, and generally entertaining legal discourse on the so-called "unwritten law": that a cuckolded husband or a woman wronged has the God-given right to avenge or be avenged, even to redress by murder. With a curiously dispassionate, or at least overly serious, foreword by Cal State-Fullerton professor Gordon Morris Bakken, Neal's tales of adultery, …

Willa Cather [From Blackwell Encyclopedia Of Twentieth-Century American Fiction], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather is known primarily for her novels representing the experiences of women immigrants on the Nebraska prairies in the late nineteenth century, but Cather’s 10 novels and scores of short stories’ produced over a career spanning 50 years actually range widely over space and time, from seventeenth-century Quebec to twentieth century New York. A social conservative who proudly identified herself as one of the backward-looking, her experiments with fictional form and her approach to culture nevertheless ally her with modernism. It is, perhaps, the depth and diversity of Cather’s body of work and the impossibility of reducing her achievement …

Did A Woman Write “The Great American Novel”? Judging Women’S Fiction In The Nineteenth Century And Today, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In the fall of 2009, as I was preparing to teach a senior capstone course for English majors on the nineteenth-century American novel and questions of literary value and the canon, I went trolling for suggestions of recent secondary readings about canonicity. The response came back loud and clear: “The canon wars are over. We all teach whatever we want to teach, and everything is fine.” My experiences with students suggest that, at least in American literary studies before 1900, the canon wars are not over, or, perhaps, they have entered a new stage. Most of my students had heard …

Chintz Appliqué Albums: Memory And Meaning In Nineteenth Century Quilts Of The Delaware River Valley, Carolyn K. Ducey

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examined two sub-sets of a unique style of chintz appliqué album quilt that developed in the 1840s in Delaware River Valley, specifically Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Trenton, New Jersey. The two groups provide examples of two distinct roles that the album quilts played in the lives of their makers: one acting as a literal record of familial ties, serving to preserve memory and reinforce family structure and the other representing the work of the members of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia, providing a vehicle to recognize and appreciate dedicated service and playing a role in encouraging interest and …

Edith Lewis As Editor, Every Week Magazine, And The Contexts Of Cather's Fiction, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

On 26 August 1915 the New York Times reported the spectacle of two "Women Editors" who became "Lost in Colorado Canon" as a "Result of Trip with Inexperienced Guide." "Miss Willa Sibert Cather, a former editor of McClure's Magazine, and Miss Edith Lewis, assistant editor at Every Week, had a nerve-racking experience in the Mesa Verde wilds," they reported, giving Lewis and Cather roughly equivalent status as magazine professionals and comic fodder ("Lost"). The war in Europe was still far away for most Americans that August, although the sinking of the Lusitania in May had inched the conflict closer. In …

Susanna Rowson’S Transatlantic Career, Melissa J. Homestead, Camryn Hansen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The contention that Charlotte is best understood as part of Rowson’s career, a career that spanned a period of years and the Atlantic Ocean, is central to our analysis and to the recovery of Rowson’s authorial agency. In Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America, Angela Vietto argues for the importance of the “literary career” as a category of analysis for women, of “examinin[g] the course writers followed in their pursuit of writing as a vocation—their progress in a variety of kinds of projects, both in their texts and in their performances as authors” (91). Although we leave the work …

Self-Advocacy Of Women In Sexualized Labor, 1880-1980s, Kim Marie Matthews

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this study is to centralize, into women's history, the marginalized historical voices of women activists working in sexualized labor (and/or those using sexualized economic strategies). This thesis situates the work of Josie Washburn, a former madam who turned self advocate in 1907, squarely within the Progressive Era debate on prostitution, By centralizing women's voices of sexualized lahor, it provides a means to track the long-term evolution of the intersections between women's sexualized labor choices, traditional labor choices, self-advocacy, popular media, and social/political movements on behalf of women. This study asserts that a majority Progressive Era working women …

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 …

Women In History - Abigail Adams: Life, Accomplishments, And Ideas, Sharon K. Kenan

Journal of Women in Educational Leadership

Abigail Adams's fame derives in large part from her marriage to the second President of the United States, John Adams (Freidel, 1989). However, she also had attributes of her own that made her an interesting and perennially famous woman in the history of the United States. One of her most enduring legacies is the volume of correspondence she wrote during lonely separations from her husband while he handled the nation's business and left her alone with four children. Firsthand accounts of the period leading up to, during, and following the American Revolution are available through those letters (Withey, 1981). Eventually …

Review Of Women And Authorship In Revolutionary America And Learning To Stand And Speak: Women, Education, And Public Life In America’S Republic, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Two books published in the 1980s had a deep influence on the study of American women novelists of the early republic and the antebellum era. Mary Kelley’s Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (1984) presented twelve popular women novelists as deeply conflicted about their role as public producers of culture. The chapters in Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986) that treat women novelists and their readers as worthy of serious analysis significantly altered the course of scholarship on the early American novel. Angela Vietto clearly frames Women and Authorship …

Review Of Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women In America, 1850-1900, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Like Naomi Z. Sofer's Making the America of Art (2005) and Anne E. Boyd's Writing for Immorality (2004), Susan Williams Reclaiming Authorship seeks to recreate and analyze how American women authors in the second half of the nineteenth century understood their own authorship. All three include Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson as subjects, but Williams includes authors who did not conceive of their authorship in a high cultural mode (Maria Cummins, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge), and she traverses the careers of Alcott and Phelps so as to emphasize their movements in and out of …