Women's History Commons^™

‘It All Comes From Me’: Bahu Begam And The Making Of The Awadh Nawabi, Circa 1765–1815, Nicholas J. Abbott

History Faculty Publications

This article examines the durable, yet largely overlooked, claims of Bahu Begam (1727–1815) to dynastic wealth and authority in the Awadh nawabi (1722–1856), a North Indian Mughal ‘successor state’ and an important client of the East India Company. Chief consort (khass mahal) to Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula (r. 1754–75) and mother to his successor Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula (r. 1775–97), Bahu Begam played a well-documented role in the regime’s tumultuous politics, particularly during Warren Hastings’s tenure as the Company’s governor-general (1773–85) and his later parliamentary impeachment. But despite her prominent political influence, little attention has been paid to the substance of her …

Review Of Neuman, Johanna. Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought For Women’S Right To Vote, Kelly L. Marino

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Kelly L. Marino.

Neuman, J. (2019). Gilded suffragists: The New York socialites who fought for women’s right to vote. New York University Press.

The Frontier Demimonde: Prostitution In Early Hays City, 1867-1883, Hollie Marquess M.A.

History Faculty Publications

Hays City, Kansas, founded in 1867, became a bustling Western frontier town due to its possession of the Eastern Division terminus of the Union Pacific Railroad and its position near a military post, Fort Hays. Prostitutes, often among the first arrivals to Western frontier towns, played an integral role in the social and economic livelihood of Hays City. Sex work brought necessary commerce to the town and helped to support other aspects of Hays City nightlife like the gambling dens and saloons. Though respectable employment was largely closed to women in the West, prostitutes in Hays City maintained a mutually …

German And American Transnational Spaces In Women's And Gender History, Shelley Rose

History Faculty Publications

Books Reviewed:

Michaela Bank. Women of Two Countries: German-American Women, Women’s Rights, and Nativism, 1848–1890. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. vi.+ 192 pp. ISBN 978-0-85745-512-3 (cl).

Karen Hagemann and Sonya Michel, eds. Gender and the Long Postwar: The United States and the Two Germanys, 1945–1989. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. vii. +397 pp. ISBN 978-1-4214-1413-3 (pb).

Lynne Tatlock. German Writing, American Reading: Women and the Import of Fiction, 1866, 1917. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2012. ix.+ 347 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-8142-1194-6 (cl).

The Family Politics Of The Federation Of South African Women: A History Of Public Motherhood In Women’S Antiracist Activism, Meghan Healy-Clancy

History Faculty Publications

This article reexamines the roots of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), the first national organization of women from all state-defined racial groups united against apartheid, founded in 1954. It argues that the deep history of public motherhood in southern Africa was what made FEDSAW possible: biological and symbolic motherhood had long been associated with responsibility for public social life in the region. Moreover, the article demonstrates that the first half of the twentieth century represented a time of profound transformation in the ways that women in southern Africa talked about and experienced motherhood. The influences of both missionary …

'Fors Clavigera', The Young Women Of Whitelands College, And The Temptations Of Social History, Christopher Bischof

History Faculty Publications

On the first of May each year from the 1880s onward the young women at Whitelands teacher training college in London celebrated by throwing to the wind the timetable that normally dictated how their every moment would be spent. Instead, they adorned the college in flowers, donned in white dresses, and spent the day dancing, singing, and reading poetry. The tradition of May Day helped to poke a hole in the rather dour institutional regimen of Whitelands, which opened the way for many smaller, everyday acts that gradually reworked the ethos of the college.

Navigating Body, Class, And Disability In The Life Of Agnes Burns Wieck, Caroline Waldron Merithew

History Faculty Publications

The concerns expressed in Burns Wieck’s letter to Hapgood typify many of the issues that occupied her during the course of her life. She, like many Americans in the early twentieth century, thought that there were economic disparities as well as great cultural divisions between the working and middle classes in a capitalist system. Burns Wieck worried about how nature and environment shaped physical and emotional existence for her as a woman and as a worker.4 A question she asked about childbirth in her letter—“Why, oh why, can’t they find some way to humanize that experience?”—is one that she might …

Gender Concerns: Monks, Nuns, And Patronage Of The Cistercian Order In Thirteenth-Century Flanders And Hainaut, Erin L. Jordan

History Faculty Publications

The Cistercian order, which had its origins in the late eleventh century, transformed the spiritual landscape of western Europe. The order's insistence on a return to the austerity and simplicity that had originally informed Benedictine life reenergized monasticism, spawning hundreds of new abbeys within decades. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Cistercians dominated monastic life, surpassing their black-robed predecessors in terms of popularity and replacing them among patrons as favored recipients of donations. Yet, while a sizable body of historiography exists concerning the ability of men's houses to translate this appeal into spiritual and material success, questions remain …

Educating Women: Schooling And Identity In England And France, 1800-1867 (Book Review), Christopher Bischof

History Faculty Publications

Christina de Bellaigue’s Educating Women: Schooling and Identity in England and France, 1800-1867 explores stereotypes about women’s boarding schools on both sides of the English-French Channel. In the process de Bellaigue identifies the basis in reality which many of the most widespread stereotypes had, including: the socially grasping schoolmistress; the schoolmistress as a gentlewoman fallen on hard times; the short-lived nature of many schools; the stress laid on the teaching of “accomplishments”; and the idea that preparing women for their domestic role was the ultimate goal of an education. However, she also simultaneously undermines these stereotypes by supplying nuance and …

Historic Heteroessentialism And Other Orderings In Early America, Jen Manion

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Much Married Michael Kramer’: Evangelical Clergy And Bigamy In Ernestine Saxony, 1522-1542, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

‘A Mob Of Women’ Confront Post-Colonial Republican Politics: How Class, Race, And Partisan Ideology Affected Gendered Political Space In Nineteenth-Century Southwestern Colombia, James Sanders

History Faculty Publications

This essay explores why some groups of women in nineteenth–century Colombia were able to engage in public, political action but others were not. Elite conservative women (mostly white) and popular liberal women (mostly black and mulatta) found ways to participate publicly in republican politics, but elite liberal women (mostly white) and some popular conservative women (mostly Indian) were largely absent from the public sphere. I argue that colonial gender roles, elite and popular visions of citizenship, the contest between the Liberal and Conservative Parties, the structure of indigenous communities, and popular liberal women's access to independent economic resources all helped …

Clerical Marriage And Territorial Reformation In Ernestine Saxony And The Diocese Of Merseburg In 1522-1524., Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

'We Were Not Ladies': Gender, Class, And A Women’S Auxiliary’S Battle For Mining Unionism, Caroline Waldron Merithew

History Faculty Publications

“We Were Not Ladies” uses the 1930s dual union fight between the United Mine Workers of America and the Progressive Miners to challenge the historiography on women’s auxiliaries in the United States. While most labor and women’s historians have focused on the traditional and supporting roles that non-wage-earning women played in male unions, I show a more radical side to working-class housewives’ activism. Through the Women’s Auxiliary of the Progressive Miners, coal miners’ daughters and wives recognized that conventional gender roles could neither gain them political and economic power in their communities, nor could these roles encompass their evolving political …

De La Mujer Invisible Al Feminismo Ineludible: Política Y Antropología En La Historiografía De La Mujer, Robert H. Holden

History Faculty Publications

La historiografía de la mujer, desde el comienzo de su etapa contemporánea en los años setenta del siglo pasado, es analizada en dos vertientes relacionadas: Una, su politización al servicio del movimiento social que aboga por la extensión de los derechos de la mujer y que dió luz a dicha historiografía; dos, el papel central que ha jugado la pregunta antropológica, ‘¿Qué es la mujer’?, y la variedad de respuestas que esta pregunta ha generado. El autor sostiene que tanto la intensa politización como el desarrollo de una antropología cada vez más materialista, como tendencias interdependientes, han llegado a caracterizar …

Teaching In A Gendered World, Karen Sotiropoulos, Ian Christopher Fletcher

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Force And Colonial Development In Eastern Uganda, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

This article explores why and how administrators and missionaries in Eastern Uganda came to associate progress and development with the need to whip, coerce, and imprison women, developing new institutions for the violent control of wives that went far beyond more common patterns of informal patriarchal control. New Native Courts took over from husbands in arranging for troublesome wives to be whipped. New mission associations of church, teachers’ and evangelists’ groups, and church men’s groups worked to establish Christian patriarchal control over wives who rejected husbands and Christ. Both officials and missionaries understood clearly that the government and missions needed …

(Review) A Negotiated Settlement, Marc R. Forster

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.